Jay Woods, Chief Global Strategist for Freedom Capital Markets, shares why he thinks the market could be on the upswing in the second half of 2025.
Caroline Woods: You’re not just bullish on regional banks though. You’re bullish on the overall market in the second half of the year. Why is now the time for the market to continue to run.
Jay Woods: I am and I don’t like it when I get this giddy, but we just withstood one of the biggest sell offs and biggest times of uncertainty. You know, the market climbed this wall of worry. Well, we not only climb the wall, we’re standing on top, looking down. Now we have our sights going higher. So to me, this is all the ammunition you have Fed about to lower rates. The tariffs, which were still we don’t know where these things are going to end up. The market doesn’t care. So as someone that’s followed and studied market price and market activity and then been a part of the market for 33 years down here. When you go in this environment where it’s the end of the world, sentiment got to historical lows. I’m not talking like, you know, lows for a year or two. No historical lows worse than 1987. Worse than, we had to go back to the Great Depression to see sentiment levels that reached as low as they did just in April when we had liberation day. So that was the washout. Now we’ve made that back, and now we start to build from here. And what are people going to do. They’re going to play, catch up. We’ve seen that the US not the best performing market, not even close. So there are a lot of institutions who have been kind of on the sidelines since the retail investors, people that watch TheStreet, they’re the ones that have been buying this dip and are doing really well. The institutions are going to have to put money to work. And what do they do. They Chase performance. Yes you know, we’re back in Nvidia. We’re back in meta. We’re back in Microsoft. Yes we’re in the large cap banks. And so when you see new highs to me they always beget new highs until the last one, and you never know when that’s going to be. But when you look at a general move over secular time period. And we’re in a secular bull market, I still think we have a good 12 to 18 months to run. Once we get all this uncertainty away, I think we’re poised to have a good second year in the Trump administration and a good 2026. But I like how we’re set up going to end this year to.
Caroline Woods: Tell us some names that are set up well for the second half of the year, what names have momentum right now.
Jay Woods: Well, financials I look at the place we’re sitting right now. I use the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq . The exchanges continue to do well. Trading is at all time highs. There are more vehicles to trade. So to me you want to be in the exchanges Visa Mastercard. They got hit a little bit with some of the crypto news. I still think those are two great names to buy put away over the long term. And then I mentioned the big financials and JP Morgan. But then you want to pivot. Let’s talk technology stocks. I mean, no one talks about IBM or Cisco. Cisco Cisco is now a cyber play. They acquired Splunk. That deal went through in 2024. So they’ve got an accretive year of revenue under their belt from that acquisition. That was a huge cyber play that is starting to pay dividends. So you look at what they’ve started to do. They broaden their horizons. It’s still not at its highs from the.com era. Now, I lived through the.com era. I remember Cisco was one of the preeminent stocks in the world. Now it didn’t catch up with Apple or Microsoft. It’s left for dead. But guess what. It’s coming back to life. So I love the Cisco’s the IBMs. But when you talk leadership and why I’m bullish on this market overall, you got to look at what drives the market. It’s the large cap names that the S&P 500, those magnificent names they’re breaking out to New highs. Nvidia has done nothing for 12 months. It finally broke out above 150. I’ve been pounding the table. And once this gets above 150, it’s going to run. I still think this stock could be at 200 by the end of the year. That’s a nice return. Meta about to make new highs Microsoft the first of the mag 7 to make new highs. These this is why I’m so bullish when the leadership is right. So in bull markets you want to see technology lead. You want to see financials the one laggard. Consumer discretionary. Let’s blame Tesla and Elon Musk for that. He caused some havoc. He hasn’t gotten back to near New highs. It’s the second biggest stock in that index. But I love Amazon. Amazon has room to run. Andy Jassy is doing magnificent things. They’re going to go I lose a cut cut a few jobs. But I think Amazon is poised to also be a great leader in the second half of the year.
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