Can market highs continue into next week?
Markets ended the week at record highs, but can they keep on keeping on or will market naysayers get the best of them? All this and more in this edition of our Yahoo Finance roundtable where we recap the biggest stories of this week and tell you what to look out for next week.
THE WEEK IN REVIEW
It seems like market highs will never end and that happy days are here again. “If this market was any less tense it would be absolutely sound asleep,” says Yahoo Finance’s Jeff Macke. “It’s drifting higher…things are perfect and if history’s been a judge that means it’s an exquisite time to take some off the table.” Markets responded to lots of positive M&A activity and the ECB going negative with rates, which marks a first for a major central bank.
U.S. and China trade tension is heating up once more. “We had the tariffs on solar panels, but to me that’s kind of the undercard of the main event,” says Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Aaron Task. “Which is China’s continued verbal crackdown on big U.S. technology companies.” The story may have been a bit of a sleeper this week, but Task things it will become a bigger and bigger issue.
M&A activity continued to strengthen this week. “We had a bidding war escalate this week for Hillshire brands, and you also have Sprint and T-Mobile looking like they’re going to make a real go at trying to merge,” says Yahoo Finance’s Mike Santoli. This is typical, late Bull market behavior, according to Santoli. “The debt markets are not going to get any more generous than they are right now and companies they have the cash and have to move.” Watch out for an upward spiral of this activity over the summer and fall.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR NEXT WEEK
The big question next week is whether or not the market can continue to defy the skeptics. “This has been the most hated bull market in history, it’s been five years now that people have been betting against it saying it’s a bubble, it can’t continue and yet it keeps going higher,” says Task. Macke is also expecting new highs next week. “This is a market where you get in trouble if you over think it, which means it’s time to put on some technical indicators. Just follow that uptrend.” Markets are up around 105% in five years with a good uptrend tick and Macke is feeling good about the trend this summer.
Look out for the NFIB small-business sentiment index next week, says Santoli. It assesses the mood of small-business owners but Santoli believes it reveals something bigger. He thinks it will reveal a skilled labor scarcity. “That’s been the biggest problem that’s been emerging recently and it’s about to cross over to pre-crisis levels,” he says. Down the road, this labor scarcity might be what derails the swinging economy.
Lauren’s Last Word
“I’m not even a sports fan,” says Yahoo Finance’s Lauren Lyster “But I’m going to say for the next week watch the start of the World Cup, NBA finals, the Stanley cup…because that might be what investors are talking about if market volatility remains at the lows that it’s been at.”
