Wall Street Shows Its bouncebackability : McGeever

By Jamie McGeever


ORLANDO, Florida, Feb 5 (Reuters) - "Bouncebackability."


This Britishism is usually connected with cliche-prone soccer managers trumpeting their teams' ability to react to beat. It's unlikely to discover its method across the pond into the Wall Street crowd's lexicon, however it perfectly summarizes the U.S. stock market's strength to all the problems, shocks and whatever else that's been tossed at it recently.


And there have actually been a lot: U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff flip-flops, extended appraisals, extreme concentration in Big Tech and online-learning-initiative.org the DeepSeek-led chaos that just recently called into question America's "exceptionalism" in the worldwide AI arms race.


Any one of those problems still has the potential to snowball, causing an of offering that might press U.S. equities into a correction or perhaps bear-market territory.


But Wall Street has become extremely durable given that the 2022 thrashing, particularly in the last 6 months.


Just take a look at the artificial intelligence-fueled chaos on Jan. 27, spurred by Chinese startup DeepSeek's discovery that it had established a large language model that could attain comparable or much better outcomes than U.S.-developed LLMs at a fraction of the cost. By lots of steps, the market move was seismic.


Nvidia shares fell 17%, slicing almost $600 billion off the company's market cap, the biggest one-day loss for any business ever. The value of the larger U.S. stock exchange fell by around $1 trillion.


Drilling deeper, experts at JPMorgan discovered that the thrashing in "long momentum" - essentially buying stocks that have been carrying out well recently, such as tech and AI shares - was a near "7 sigma" relocation, or 7 times the standard deviation. It was the third-largest fall in 40 years for this trading technique.


But this impressive move didn't crash the market. Rotation into other sectors sped up, and around 70% of S&P 500-listed stocks ended the day greater, implying the more comprehensive index fell only 1.45%. And purchasers of tech stocks soon returned.


U.S. equity funds attracted almost $24 billion of inflows recently, innovation fund inflows hit a 16-week high, and momentum funds attracted favorable flows for a fifth-consecutive week, according to EPFR, the fund flows tracking company.


"Investors saw the DeepSeek-triggered selloff as a chance rather than an off-ramp," EPFR director of research study Cameron Brandt composed on Monday. "Fund flows ... suggest that many of those investors kept faith with their previous assumptions about AI."


PANIC MODE?


Remember "yenmageddon," the yen bring trade volatility of last August? The yen's unexpected bounce from a 33-year low against the dollar stimulated worries that investors would be forced to sell properties in other markets and countries to cover losses in their substantial yen-funded carry trades.


The yen's rally was severe, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr on par with previous monetary crises, and the Nikkei's 12% fall on Aug. 5 was the biggest one-day drop considering 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 disappeared rapidly. The S&P 500 recouped its losses within 2 weeks, and the Nikkei did similarly within a month.


So Wall Street has passed 2 big tests in the last six months, a period that included the U.S. presidential election and Trump's return to the White House.


What explains the strength? There's no one obvious answer. Investors are broadly bullish about Trump's financial program, the Fed still seems to be in relieving mode (in the meantime), the AI frenzy and U.S. exceptionalism stories are still in play, and liquidity is numerous.


Perhaps one essential chauffeur is a well-worn one: the Fed put. Investors - a number of whom have spent an excellent portion of their working lives in the age of extraordinarily loose monetary policy - may still feel that, if it really comes down to it, the Fed will have their backs.


There will be more pullbacks, and dangers of a more extended downturn do appear to be growing. But for wiki.myamens.com now, the rebounds keep coming. That's bouncebackability.


(The viewpoints expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.)


(By Jamie McGeever; Editing by Rod Nickel)