Wall Street Shows Its 'bouncebackability': McGeever
By Jamie McGeever
ORLANDO, Florida, Feb 5 (Reuters) - "Bouncebackability."
This Britishism is normally related to cliche-prone soccer supervisors trumpeting their teams' capability to react to beat. It's not likely to discover its method across the pond into the Wall Street crowd's lexicon, but it completely sums up the U.S. stock market's resilience to all the setbacks, shocks and whatever else that's been thrown at it recently.
And there have actually been a lot: systemcheck-wiki.de U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff flip-flops, extended appraisals, severe concentration in Big Tech and the DeepSeek-led turmoil that just recently called into question America's "exceptionalism" in the global AI arms race.
Any one of those problems still has the prospective to snowball, causing an avalanche of offering that might push U.S. equities into a correction or perhaps bear-market area.
But Wall Street has actually ended up being incredibly resistant considering that the 2022 thrashing, especially in the last six months.
Just take a look at the synthetic intelligence-fueled chaos on Jan. 27, stimulated by Chinese startup DeepSeek's discovery that it had actually established a big language design that might attain comparable or better outcomes than U.S.-developed LLMs at a portion of the cost. By numerous procedures, the market relocation was seismic.
Nvidia shares fell 17%, slicing nearly $600 billion off the firm's market cap, the greatest one-day loss for any company ever. The value of the broader U.S. stock exchange fell by around $1 trillion.
Drilling deeper, analysts at JPMorgan discovered that the thrashing in "long momentum" - essentially purchasing stocks that have been performing well recently, such as tech and AI shares - was a near "7 sigma" move, or seven times the basic discrepancy. It was the third-largest fall in 40 years for this trading strategy.
But this impressive move didn't crash the marketplace. Rotation into other sectors accelerated, and around 70% of S&P 500-listed stocks ended the day higher, meaning the more comprehensive index fell just 1.45%. And purchasers of tech stocks soon returned.
U.S. equity funds brought in nearly $24 billion of inflows last week, innovation fund inflows struck a 16-week high, and momentum funds brought in favorable flows for a fifth-consecutive week, according to EPFR, smfsimple.com the fund streams tracking firm.
"Investors saw the DeepSeek-triggered selloff as an opportunity rather than an off-ramp," EPFR director of research Cameron Brandt wrote on Monday. "Fund flows ... suggest that a lot of those financiers kept faith with their previous assumptions about AI."
PANIC MODE?
Remember "yenmageddon," the yen carry trade volatility of last August? The yen's sudden bounce from a 33-year low against the dollar sparked worries that investors would be required to offer possessions in other markets and nations to cover losses in their big yen-funded carry trades.
The yen's rally was severe, on par with past monetary crises, and the Nikkei's 12% fall on Aug. 5 was the greatest one-day drop because October 1987 and the second-largest on record.
The panic, if it can be called that, spread. The S&P 500 lost 8% in 2 days. But it vanished quickly. The S&P 500 recouped its losses within 2 weeks, and the Nikkei did likewise within a month.
So Wall Street has actually passed 2 huge tests in the last six months, a duration that included the U.S. governmental election and Trump's go back to the White House.
What explains the strength? There's nobody obvious answer. Investors are broadly bullish about Trump's financial agenda, the Fed still seems to be in relieving mode (in the meantime), the AI frenzy and U.S. exceptionalism narratives are still in play, and liquidity is abundant.
Perhaps one key chauffeur is a well-worn one: the Fed put. Investors - numerous of whom have actually invested an excellent piece of their working lives in the period of extraordinarily loose financial policy - may still feel that, if it really boils down to it, the Fed will have their backs.
There will be more pullbacks, and dangers of a more extended decline do seem to be growing. But for now, the rebounds keep coming. That's bouncebackability.
(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a writer for .)
(By Jamie McGeever; Editing by Rod Nickel)