Money Life with Chuck Jaffe

Jeanette Garretty says there is a very real risk of recession in the next nine months, but she sees no reason to expect anything worse than a "garden-variety, U.S. economic recession, with a couple of quarters negative and then a fairly quick rebound in economic activity with the markets leading" that recovery. Garretty notes that there are risks that could exacerbate problems and make a downturn...

Axel Merk, president and chief investment officer at Merk Funds and Merk Investments, says investors need to be cautious about accepting current market risks and keep an eye on their sleep factor "because whatever [investment] thesis you have, it will be tested." Merk notes that he is hesitant facing today's economic conditions because there are still a lot of possible outcomes based on anticipate...

Laura Martin, equity analyst at Needham & Co., says that streaming technology companies saw their maturation curve speed up during the pandemic, with the fallout being current pricing pressures as consumers wise up to the various pricing models that best meet their needs. She also discusses ad-tech and big-tech stocks and U.S.-China trade tensions in a wide-ranging Big Interview. Also on the show,...

Noted market bear Harry Dent -- who called for a 50 percent market crash when he was last on the show in late May of 2021 -- says that efforts made to prolong the bull market have exacerbated the trouble that the financial world must now slog through "the crash of our lifetimes." He's calling for a recession and a massive market downturn -- saying the Standard & Poor's 500 is due to fall roughly 8...

Lindsey Bell, chief markets and money strategist at Ally Invest, says that investors are engaging in a proverbial flight to quality by moving from the individual stocks and the security picking that fueled their interest in the market during the rebound from Covid to buying indexes and holding the market despite broader declines happening now. It's not the traditional way that investors seek safet...

Andrew Patterson, senior international economist at The Vanguard Group, says that recession "is not our base case right now," because economic growth is coming in at reasonable levels, even if it is taking longer than the Federal Reserve was hoping for to achieve that healthier level of activity. Patterson thinks GDP growth can be back to its long-term trend levels by the end of the year. Kathryn...

Emily Roland, co-chief investment strategist at John Hancock Investment Management, says the bond market is pricing in 11 quarter-point rate hikes from the Federal Reserve this year, and with three in the books through May, she believes the Fed will step back from its plan and that rates will not move up as much as anticipated. As a result, she is expecting a bond rally that will help fixed-income...

Ron Sanchez, chief investment officer at Fiduciary Trust Company International, says that while the stock market will remain particularly challenging as it waits to see how successful the Federal Reserve will be in helping to curb inflation and keeping the economic pump primed, the bond market has seen yields rise to levels that are attractive right now despite the higher inflation rates. Sanchez...

Doug Loeffler, executive vice president of investment management at Sierra Investment Management, says his firm is mostly in cash right now because current conditions look like a "very sustained equity drawdown," and while he expects to see the market rally later in the year, he says this is a time for investors to take what the market is going to give them, rather than "trying to tell the market...

In two different interviews today, experts see a market capable of rallying but not necessarily able to hold off a longer-term bearish trend. Market-timer Heeten Doshi, portfolio manager at  Doshi Capital Management, says that we're seeing "a day trader's market" -- high on volatility, low on direction and conviction from buyers -- that is poised for "a big bounce" or a bear-market rally because i...

Greg McBride, chief analyst for BankRate.com, says that while the site's latest survey shows that few Americans are boosting their stock holdings right now, a majority is still as committed to buying stocks as they were a year ago, with more than half of U.S. investors saying they purposely had made no moves in response to current market volatility. In The Big Interview, Ken McAtamney, who runs th...

In a bonus interview from Money Life at Morningstar, Sarah Ketterer -- chief executive officer at Causeway Capital Management -- warns investors against turning paper losses into real ones, sticking with what has been working or what still has the potential to pan out that an investor saw when they made their purchase, though she acknowledges that playing with a portfolio on the margins and making...

David Snowball, founder of MutualFundObserver.com, says that the current market conditions are challenging investors to make sure they have a handle on what they own and why they own it, because they can't depend on the Federal Reserve to manage a soft landing to current economic challenges. It's one of many highlights as Money Life wraps up its coverage from the Morningstar Investment Conference...

Money Life is back for Day 2 from the Morningstar Investment Conference, and the action heats up with more interviews covering wider grounds. A day after T. Rowe Price star manager David Giroux said there's no reason for investors to invest internationally, Chautauqua Capital's David Lubchenco will come back with a counter-attack, talking about how and why foreign stocks are poised to outperform d...

Money Life travels to the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago, where David Giroux, portfolio manager for T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation, kicks things off by saying that most investors have no good reason to buy international stocks, noting that they can instead purchase U.S. multi-nationals, and pointing out that the recent market downturn has made many of those companies significantl...

Paul Dlugosch, portfolio manager for the Buffalo High-Yield, says that the high-inflation and rising-rate environment has been mostly priced in to the high-yield bond market, which will make the quality and strength of corporate earnings the big determinant of whether the junk-bond market can recover or if it will face troubles that linger to 2023 and beyond. Also on the show, David Trainer of New...

Veteran technical analyst Martin Pring of Pring Research says the market is showing signs that the current bear market could be part of a larger, secular bear market. If indeed those long-term trends are bad -- so that the current downturn is part of a larger downtrend rather than a blip in the long-running bull market -- Pring says the current downturn will stick around for 12 to 18 months. Pring...

Tom Lydon, chief executive at ETFTrends.com, says that with inflation entrenched in the economy right now and not looking like it will go away for several years, investors need to take steps to deal with the impact that global-supply chain issues and more are having on their investment holdings. To that end, he made the VanEck Inflation Allocation fund his "ETF of the Week," noting that the real-a...

Brian Levitt, global market strategist for Invesco says that there is some good news in the market -- with signs that the bond market is expecting inflation to slow and ease and other indicators showing promise -- but everyone should be watching the impact of Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes to see how long the current doldrums drag on. Levitt noted that less than 25 percent of companies on the...

Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for the Independent Advisor Alliance;, says that the current economic situation is different from the Covid meltdown or other recent difficult times because "This time, the Fed doesn't have your back." As a result, investors should not expect a V-bottom to the downturn and a quick bounceback, and investors should be making marginal changes to their portfo...

John Bonnanzio, editor at Fidelity Monitor & Insight, says investors need to be as cautious as possible right now, focusing in on their investment time horizon so that they can ride out the potential downturns on the table in the short- and intermediate-term as the market sorts out the high-inflationary environment. Bonnanzio notes that investors with long time frames may want to consider how some...

Jim Welsh, macro strategist at Smart Portfolios and the author of MacroTides, says he still believes the market can rally during the last half of the year, but he says investors have to respect the current downtrend, which is likely to get worse before any bounceback. Welsh notes that consumer savings should help absorb inflation, business spending is up, demand is higher and he believes the econo...

Alan McKnight, chief investment officer at Regions Asset Management says that "the path forward is different than the path we have been on," and that investors must now keep  inflation and interest rates "top of mind" as they rethink what is possible and reasonable for the market. He noted that Regions' forecast of returns of 1.5 to 2 percent annualized gains for bonds and roughly 6 percent averag...

Lawrence McMillan, president of McMillan Analysis, says that he is seeing signs of a bear market -- which he believes we are in -- in the form of heightened volatility where rallies are in full force one minute and wiped out the next. McMillan says that while the market is showing signs of being oversold, it's not time to act on that yet because only one of the eight primary indicators he tracks i...

Charles Rotblut, editor of the AAII Journal -- Money Life's all-time leader in guest appearances, but also the person responsible for maintaining the American Association of Individual Investors' sentiment survey -- says that investor optimism over the last three weeks has reached some of the lowest levels seen since the group started its survey in 1987. Rotblut says that when optimism is unusuall...