The Most Important Number of the Week Is 105.1
Institutional investors turned net bullish on U.S. stocks for the first time this year.
The smart money catches on to what the dumb money has known all along.
Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
American exceptionalism is back! Or at least it is in the stock market. U.S. equities surged 16.7% in the first seven months of the year, trouncing the 5.90% gain in the rest of the world through late Friday as measured by the benchmark MSCI indexes. Not only that, but the U.S. outperformed by 4.06 percentage points this month, the most since April 2020.
Despite the heady performance, one critical ingredient had been missing: the backing of those with the most at stake. But that changed this month, when a State Street Global Markets index released Wednesday showed that institutional investors turned net bullish on the U.S. for the first time this year. The change in sentiment underscores how the outlook for the U.S. is only becoming stronger relative to the rest of the world, which is a testament to the policies put in place by the government and Federal Reserve to support the economy as the pandemic lingers. It also suggests that maybe the “dumb money” has been smart all along.