Displaying items by tag: 2019

(New York)

It’s that time of year. Analysts from many banks are putting out their top picks for the year. The picks we are featuring focus mostly on the large cap space. The picks come from a range of different analysts and include: Google, Amazon, American Eagle, Broadcom, Deere, McDonald’s, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

FINSUM: Deere and McDonalds are interesting for us. Deere because farm equipment demand could be quite heavily impacted by US-China trade tensions, which makes this one a risky bet. McDonalds is a stock we are bullish on because of its menu changes and modernization efforts. We think it has a lot of business it can steal back from the likes of Shake Shack and Chipotle if it continues to make its menu fresher and more healthful and its store more appealing.

(New York)

We ask you, readers, to name the single most important factor that has supported stock prices through all the turmoil over the last year. We bet more than half of you uttered “earnings” to yourself. Earnings have grown strongly in the last year, something that helped keep prices stable despite big geopolitical worries. However, there pillar of the market may now be crumbling as analysts have just turned the earnings outlook negative for the first time in three years. Analysts now expect first quarter earnings to decline by almost 1% from last year. By contrast, at the end of December, expectations were for a 3.3% gain. Most expect the weakness to come from margins, not top line growth.

FINSUM: Continued strong earnings were supposed to be one of the positives this year. If earnings sputter out, what is there to hold up the market in the face of so much uncertainty?