Wall Street Shows Its 'bouncebackability': McGeever
By Jamie McGeever
ORLANDO, Florida, Feb 5 (Reuters) - "Bouncebackability."
This Britishism is generally connected with cliche-prone soccer supervisors trumpeting their teams' ability to respond to defeat. It's not likely to find its way across the pond into the Wall Street crowd's lexicon, however it completely summarizes the U.S. stock market's resilience to all the problems, shocks and whatever else that's been thrown at it recently.
And there have been a lot: U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff flip-flops, extended appraisals, severe concentration in Big Tech and the DeepSeek-led chaos that recently called into question America's "exceptionalism" in the international AI arms race.
Any among those issues still has the potential to snowball, causing an avalanche of selling that could press U.S. equities into a correction or even bear-market area.
But Wall Street has become extremely resistant given that the 2022 rout, particularly in the last six months.
Just take a look at the artificial intelligence-fueled chaos on Jan. 27, stimulated by Chinese start-up DeepSeek's discovery that it had actually established a big language design that might attain similar or much better results than U.S.-developed LLMs at a fraction of the expense. By numerous measures, the market relocation was seismic.
Nvidia shares fell 17%, slicing nearly $600 billion off the firm's market cap, funsilo.date the most significant one-day loss for any business ever. The value of the larger U.S. stock market fell by around $1 trillion.
Drilling much deeper, experts at JPMorgan discovered that the rout in "long momentum" - basically buying stocks that have actually been performing well just recently, such as tech and AI shares - was a near "7 sigma" relocation, or seven times the basic variance. It was the third-largest fall in 40 years for this trading method.
But this impressive relocation didn't crash the marketplace. Rotation into other sectors sped up, and around 70% of S&P 500-listed stocks ended the day greater, indicating the wider index fell just 1.45%. And buyers of tech stocks soon returned.
U.S. equity funds brought in nearly $24 billion of inflows last week, technology fund inflows hit a 16-week high, and momentum funds brought in favorable circulations for a fifth-consecutive week, according to EPFR, the fund flows tracking firm.
"Investors saw the DeepSeek-triggered selloff as a chance rather than an off-ramp," of research study Cameron Brandt wrote on Monday. "Fund flows ... suggest that a number of those investors kept faith with their previous presumptions about AI."
PANIC MODE?
Remember "yenmageddon," the yen bring trade volatility of last August? The yen's abrupt bounce from a 33-year low against the dollar sparked fears that investors would be required to offer possessions in other markets and nations to cover losses in their huge yen-funded bring trades.
The yen's rally was severe, on par with previous financial crises, and the Nikkei's 12% fall on Aug. 5 was the greatest one-day drop given that 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 rapidly. The S&P 500 recovered its losses within 2 weeks, and the Nikkei did similarly within a month.
So Wall Street has passed 2 huge tests in the last 6 months, a period that consisted of the U.S. governmental election and Trump's go back to the White House.
What explains the durability? There's no one obvious answer. Investors are broadly bullish about Trump's financial agenda, the Fed still appears to be in alleviating mode (for now), the AI craze and U.S. exceptionalism narratives are still in play, and liquidity is plentiful.
Perhaps one crucial driver is a well-worn one: the Fed put. Investors - much of whom have invested a great piece of their working lives in the period of extremely loose monetary policy - might still feel that, if it truly boils down to it, the Fed will have their backs.
There will be more pullbacks, and risks of a more extended decline do seem to be growing. But for now, the rebounds keep coming. That's bouncebackability.
(The opinions revealed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.)
(By Jamie McGeever; Editing by Rod Nickel)