Wall Street strategists aren’t scared of a summer slowdown for stocks despite some indications of a cooling labor market and slowing economic activity.
In the past month, several strategists have defended their S&P 500 year-end targets in the range of 6,300 to 6,500, noting that the most dire outcomes from tariffs may no longer be on the table. On Monday, the benchmark index was trading around 6,010, about 2% from the record closing high.
In a note titled “Don’t fight it,” Morgan Stanley chief investment officer Mike Wilson pointed out that a “moderate slowdown in growth” was likely already priced in earlier this year when the average S&P 500 stock fell nearly 30%.
“In our experience, stocks and equity market internals move well ahead of lagging economic data and earnings results,” Wilson said.
To be clear, there are certainly signs of softening in economic data. Last week, ADP data showed that the private sector added 37,000 jobs in May, the lowest monthly total in more than two years. Weekly filings for unemployment claims hit their highest level since October 2024. And monthly nonfarm payroll revisions revealed 95,000 fewer jobs were added in March and April than initially thought.
But the slowdown in this data has been widely expected. The equity research team at Goldman Sachs analyzed prior “event driven recessions” such as the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the 1970s interest rate shock. Goldman’s team, led by chief US equity strategist David Kostin, found that so-called soft economic data, which encapsulates data points like consumer surveys, usually hits its cycle bottom before hard economic data, like monthly readings on inflation or job additions, does.
That’s been playing out over the past month. In May, the Conference Board’s future expectations index saw its largest monthly increase since May 2009. But data on Monday showed inflation expectations in the New York Federal Reserve’s monthly survey moved lower in May for the first time this year, perhaps marking that the worst tariff-driven inflation fears might be behind markets too.
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Kostin’s work shows the S&P 500 typically will follow the soft data’s return higher, even if hard economic data, like monthly jobs reports, continues to move lower.
“S&P 500 returns are currently more correlated with soft data than hard data,” wrote Kostin, who projects the S&P 500 will hit 6,500 in the next 12 months. “If the recovery in soft data is sustained, it should support equity returns even as hard data weaken.”
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