Equity Analysts Are Over Liberation Day Tariffs
Aggregate price targets for S&P 500 companies have started moving higher again, and that's usually a bullish sign.
Going up.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North AmericaWall Street analyst outlooks are typically bullish. If you aggregate every price target on every S&P 500 Index company and weight them to match the index, it’s exceedingly rare for the overall number to fall. The so-called “bottom-up” price target did just that in April, a good measure of how shocking President Donald Trump’s so-called Liberation Day tariffs were. The good news (potentially) is that the metric has started moving higher again. And when that happens, it’s historically a sign that the bottom is in.
The basic story seems to be that America’s tech superstars — the protagonists behind the “American exceptionalism” narrative — continue to excel, tariffs or no tariffs. On a sector basis, information technology price targets fell sharply from early April through May, but they’ve now bounced back from most of their losses, thanks no doubt to bullish earnings reports from Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and Broadcom Inc. But it’s not as if three companies are putting the entire index on their shoulders.