Wall Street Gap on Market Outlook Grows Into a Canyon
Top-down stock strategists and bottom-up analysts haven’t been this divided since the financial crisis. Look for the middle ground.
The "big picture" and "small detail" people have sharply divergent views on the S&P 500.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In life as in markets, there will always be macro folks and micro folks, each tending to believe that their approach is better than the other. The internet is filled with zippy quotations exhorting investors not to lose “sight of the big picture” while also remembering that “God is in the details.” A few others encourage them to balance the two, but those are rarer and harder to convey on a bumper sticker.
By some measures, the US stock market’s “big picture” and “small detail” people — the Wall Street strategists and analysts — haven’t been this divided on the outlook since the financial crisis. Strategists, who use “top down” frameworks to divine the most likely path of the S&P 500 Index, generally believe the market has blown past its 2023 potential and will end up backpedaling further. Analysts, the bottom-uppers who aspire to know the ins and outs of individual companies, think the index has room to run.