Enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has powered a breakneck rally in US equities this year, far overshadowing the US Federal Reserve’s campaign to raise interest rates. So how should investors sort out the fundamentals from the hype?Mark Baribeau, the head of global equity at PGIM’s Jennison Associates, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss how he’s viewing the opportunity. He’s the lead manager of the PGIM Jennison Global Opportunities Fund, which is beating 99% of its peers with a more-than 30% gain so far in 2023. “The infrastructure layer that allows for this accelerated computing to go on is the way to play AI right now. Because we’re in the R&D phase, the applications are just getting developed,” Baribeau says. “Nvidia is an easy example. We kind of refer to their earnings release on May 24 as the ‘Big Bang’ because, in my history of doing growth equities since the ‘90s, I’ve never seen a company raise guidance for a quarter by $4 billion. That’s unprecedented.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

According to Seema Shah, the chief global strategist for Principal Asset Management, the US economy will enter a recession, likely at the end of this year. Though she says it could be mild and short-lived. Shah joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss why she thinks there will be a downturn, and why it could last just two quarters. Earnings have come down and could continue to do so, she says, which may “weigh on asset prices.” And while the labor market looks strong right now, she warns that it’s a lagging indicator and could weaken fairly quickly.  “I know a lot of people out there who are expecting recession—they expect it to come in Q3. I look at the labor market, the strength of it, and I say that that's almost impossible,” Shah says. “By Q4, we would expect fairly mild negative growth, and then in Q1, a deeper downturn. But then by Q2, this is back to recovery. So this is historically a very short recession and historically a very, very mild recession.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Artificial intelligence is all the rage on Wall Street. Some strategists see AI trends driving further gains for stocks as others point to how big banks are beginning to use it to automate some jobs. MarketReader, founded by Jens Nordvig, is leveraging AI to analyze US equity market trends and help predict why a stock might be moving a certain way. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss how he sees AI helping investors digest information at a faster pace. “What’s happened this year is that actually applying AI has become so much easier than it was six months ago.” Nordvig says. “Our original plan was more focused on structural modeling, traditional fundamental modeling. But we’ve really seen how this actually allows us to do stuff that we just can’t do with traditional models.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Investing in farmland has historically offered an attractive and stable source of returns, yet it’s not an easy asset class for most investors to access. Carter Malloy founded a platform called AcreTrader in an effort to make it easier to purchase fractional ownership of a farm. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss some of the benefits and risks of this type of farmland investing. “You don’t have big, huge up years and huge down years that you do across so many other mainstream asset classes,” Malloy says. “So the consistency of the returns and that relative lack of volatility—in investor speak, the Sharpe ratio—of farmland can be very, very attractive.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A lot of investors are sitting on piles of cash. In fact, J.P. Morgan Wealth Management estimates its clients are more overweight with cash now than they’ve been in a decade.  But attractive buying opportunities could be lurking, including in fixed income, US mid-cap stocks and European equities, according to Chief Investment Strategist Tom Kennedy.  He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss corners of the market—in the US and abroad—that look enticing. He also talks about how Europe managed to avoid a recession, and why the US Federal Reserve is likely done with its hiking campaign, among other things.  “Cash very rarely outperforms, and it takes a long time for rates to go up, but they can come down really fast,” he said. “The last seven business cycles, when you have the last rate hike from the Fed, in the two years after that, cash tends to underperform duration assets.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As the US government debt-ceiling standoff heats up and markets grow more volatile, veteran Loomis Sayles & Co. portfolio manager Elaine Stokes has some advice for investors in the corporate-bond market: Get ready to buy. Stokes joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the opportunities the drama in Washington may create, the potential for a credit crunch stemming from regional-bank turmoil, and how high-yield bonds may not be as risky as they seem, given recession concerns.  “The volatility that I think we’re going to have over the next couple weeks is going to be the opportunity. So take advantage of that opportunity to buy a little further out the curve, to buy low dollar-price bonds, to build in real return for a long time,” she said on the podcast. With regard to high-yield bonds, she added: “I don’t believe that this time around it’s going to be the traditional high-yield market that’s going to see the big wave of defaults. That is going to happen in either the bank-loan market or the private market. That’s where the weaker issuance has come, the lower-quality issuance. So the traditional high-yield market is actually setting up to look pretty attractive.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brace for a US recession to start next quarter and worsen at the end of the year, and don’t bet on the Federal Reserve to react immediately to prop up growth. That’s according to Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo & Co. She joined the What Goes Up podcast to give her appraisal of the economy, and discuss what to expect for the rest of 2023.“It’s likely to be kind of more of a slow drag in terms of economic activity, just given that we also don’t think the Fed’s going to be riding to the rescue as soon as you do see that weakness,” she said on the podcast. “The nature of the inflation that we’re seeing right now, we think that the Fed’s actually going to be pretty reluctant to ease policy even as the economy is entering a recession.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While the drama surrounding regional US banks has largely subsided following the failure of three lenders in March, that doesn’t mean the ripple effects of Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes are over. This is according to Que Nguyen, chief investment officer of equities at Research Affiliates, who joined the What Goes Up podcast to give her outlook on markets and talk about why she doesn’t foresee a soft landing for the economy.“When the Fed raises rates and it breaks something, it rarely happens that it’s a very small break,” she says. “Usually it’s a very big break. And so while I’d never thought that we would get to a great-financial-crisis level of breakdown, I do believe—and I did believe, and I still believe—that there would be more things that break. Whether that continued to be in the small regional banks or whether that bled over to something else such as real estate lending, private credit—definitely those dangers still remain out there.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Runaway inflation. Surging interest rates. Bank failures. For a while it seemed like all of these issues would combine to trigger a US recession. Not so fast, says Morgan Stanley’s Seth Carpenter, the bank’s global chief economist. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain why there are signs the US could experience a “soft landing” that averts a major economic downturn.  “It seems hard to avoid the fact that the US economy is going to slow down, and part of the reason why that’s hard to avoid is because that is absolutely, categorically, by design the Fed’s objective,” he said. “We think they’re looking carefully at the data and asking, ‘Do we have enough evidence that things are slowing down a lot, but not yet crashing?’ Because that’s what they’re looking for in order to stop the hiking cycle. So we think the last hike is in May, when there’ll be more evidence of a slowdown, but not yet evidence that things have actually fallen off of a cliff.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Troy Gayeski, chief market strategist at FS Investments, says don’t wait until May to flee the stock market rally—get out now. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain why he’s expecting the S&P 500 to bottom out at around 3,200, a roughly 22% drop from current levels.“First of all, the strongest rallies have always been in bear markets,” he says. “Usually they’re driven by technical factors. And then there’s a narrative that’s put together to justify it: the more recent one was that inflation’s going to slow enough that the Fed won’t have to hike anymore, and then we’re going to have a recession and somehow that’s going to cause the Fed to cut rapidly. But recessions aren’t bad for revenue or earnings? It really makes very little sense.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.