Michael Hartnett, a strategist at the Bank of America, is warning investors that the current market rally may not last long and could be followed by a large decline.
The S&P 500 has risen by over 15 percent year-to-date as of June 16. Recently, the index rose 20 percent above its low hit on Oct. 12, 2022. Technically, when a stock rises 20 percent or more from its lows, it is seen as a sign of a bull market. However, Hartnett is not convinced that this is the beginning of a “brand, new shiny bull market,” he wrote in a note on Friday, according to Bloomberg. The analyst said that the current market looks similar to what happened back in 2000 or 2008 when a “big rally” was followed by a “big collapse.”
Hartnett sees up to 150 points in upside potential in the S&P 500 versus a 300-point downside potential until Sept. 4 Labor Day.
In February, Hartnett predicted the S&P 500 to drop to 3,800 by March 8, which failed to materialize. He blamed the failure on the U.S. economy for avoiding a recession and a credit crunch in the first half of the year.
Investors have poured money into tech companies this year. Hartnett called the rally, powered by interest in artificial intelligence tech stocks, an “unanticipated event.”
Until the Fed raises interest rates and unemployment breaks above 4 percent, stocks can potentially stay higher, he wrote in the note. Last year, Hartnett correctly predicted the selloff in stocks.
The New Bull Market, Liquidating Tech Stocks
Mike Wilson, the chief U.S. equity strategist and chief investment officer for Morgan Stanley, dismissed the idea of a 20 percent threshold for declaring new bull markets, saying that the firm does not “find much value” in such measures.
There have been “several instances of bear market rallies that exceeded the 20 percent threshold, only to eventually give way to new lows,” he said in a June 12 podcast.
For instance, after the 1946 boom, the S&P 500 corrected by 28 percent. A 24 percent choppy bear market rally followed that lasted for around 18 months until it fell to new lows a year later.
“Thus far, it appears similar to the current bear market, which corrected 27 and a half percent last year and is now rallied 24 percent from its intraday lows but is still 10 percent below the highs,” he said.
Some experts are recommending investors liquidate their tech positions due to concerns the present rally might not stick.
In a June 14 commentary, Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Advisors, warned that “investor caution should remain front and center. We do not think now is the time to be looking to add additional risk … We do not want to chase this rally higher. We don’t believe now is the time to get less defensive.”
Since the IT sector has performed strongly over the past 12 months, Wren recommends “trimming positions” in this sector and moving the funds into “attractively priced sectors” like healthcare, energy, and materials.
“Technology valuations are no longer attractive based on our analysis, and an environment of higher-for-longer interest rates is also a negative for the sector,” he wrote.
S&P 500 Performance
According to data from Slickcharts, out of the 503 companies listed in the S&P 500, only 292 firms have been in the green so far this year as of June 15. The remaining 211 are in the red.
The biggest growth was seen in Nvidia Corp., which registered a year-to-date return of over 190 percent, followed by Meta at 134 percent, Tesla at 107 percent, and Carnival Corp. at 100 percent.
The biggest loser has been Dish Network which lost over 55 percent, followed by Advance Auto Parts at 52 percent, KeyCorp at 42 percent, and Zions Bancorporation at 41 percent.
At present, people are split as to where the S&P 500 is headed for the remainder of the year, according to a recent survey conducted by Investopedia.
While 23 percent of respondents expect the index to deliver 5 percent returns or more over the next six months, 18 percent expect it to fall by 10 percent or more.
Inflation was cited as the top concern by 61 percent of respondents, followed by recession at 59 percent, America’s ties with China at 50 percent, and persistently high interest rates at 49 percent.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
