Stocks move higher despite surge in jobless claims
Scott Clemons, Brown Brothers Harriman Chief Investment Strategist, joins Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous, Brian Sozzi, Heidi Chung and Dan Roberts to discuss how the coronavirus is impacting the markets.
Video Transcript
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: I want to say hello once again to Scott Clemons of Brown Brothers Harriman and talk a little more about these markets. And Scott, in the previous segment, you said you're not calling a bottom just yet. But what are you looking at in terms of opportunity right now? Especially, what would you say to investors who have a little cash on hand, who are in a position and lucky enough to be able to say that, and want to put some of that money to work right now?
SCOTT CLEMONS: Well, you get an opportunity like this to buy so-called riskier assets, things that aren't cash, we used to say once in a lifetime, and it became a once in a generation. And now it seems to be once every 10 to 15 years. For a longer term investor, the importance is being in the market, not trying to time the market.
We went back out of curiosity and looked at what an investor's experience would have been had he been the unluckiest investor in history. What if, for example, you put all your money to work on the day the NASDAQ [INAUDIBLE] at the top of the dot com bubble? What if you put all your money to work at the day before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt?
And the answer is you still doubled or tripled your money over the space of 10 years. So for a longer term investor, yeah, the opportunity today is pretty compelling.
BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, Scott, I totally get the definition of a bear market. It remains in play, but is the bear market over, even though technically, we're still in one?
SCOTT CLEMONS: That's a good question. And Brian, I think the answer is no. Once again, I'm going back to the 2008, 2009 variant. And yes, so much about this cycle is so radically different, unprecedented.
What's the same, though, is human emotion and the swing from anxiety and fear and outright panic into hope and expectation. We're sort of going through all of those things again, although the underlying fundamentals are different. And in that 2008 scenario, we had two or three instances of a 20% or 25% market rally in October, November, December of '08 before the market finally established a bottom in '09.
So whereas it's certainly possible that the bottom was earlier this week or on Friday of last week, I'm not counting on that. I think there's more bad news, and there's more market reaction to come. The VIX is still signaling more market volatility ahead of us. That could be on the downside as well as the upside.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, Scott Clemons of Brown Brothers Harriman, always good to see you. And the next time we see you, I don't know how much longer that beard's going to get. But we're going to be checking that out.
SCOTT CLEMONS: We'll see. Thank you, Alexis.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Thanks a lot.
