Bull or bear? A look at investors
Varied approaches in 7-year bull market
One odd thing about the bull market’s recent run to new highs is many money managers still in the market and betting on stocks are nervous and not 100% committed to the bull.
Increasingly, the 71⁄ 2- year-old bull run — the most-hated rally in Wall Street history — is greeted with skepticism and cynicism from the same investors propelling the stock market to record highs. The nagging fear is Wall Street pros still have a lot of cash riding on stocks not because corporate earnings power is strong (it is most certainly not with the S&P 500 posting negative earnings growth four consecutive quarters) or because economic growth is robust (it’s tepid at best with the U.S. economy expanding at a subpar 1% clip in the first half of 2016) or because stocks are cheap. (The S&P 500, as measured by its price-to-earnings ratio, is overvalued based on history.)
No, the real reason investors are still heavily invested in stocks is because global central bankers have pushed down interest rates so low that there are few, if any, investment alternatives with a shot at producing a decent return.
The unease manifests itself in a number of different investor profiles: