Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist at Charles Schwab Talks Markets
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Thank you.

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ALL THE EQUITY DISCUSSION. I WANT TO KNOW THE ACT OF YOUR TWITTER FEED. YESTERDAY YOUR TWITTER FEED LOOKED LIKE THE FEDERAL RESERVE ANALYZING ECONOMIC DATA. IT WAS A ROCK STAR FEED OF LIKE 15 STUDIES OF GDP AND THE DYNAMICS INTO THE EQUITY MARKET. ARE YOU DOING THAT IN YOUR SPARE TIME?

creating most of the charts. You know that's Kevin's domain. If I had to create charts, it would be stick figures. They're from the Bloomberg Terminal Service. With crayons. Thankfully, I've got a great...

pair of folks with Kevin and Adrian who do the charts. But, you know, there are days where weeks happen. And this week is one of those unbelievable weeks. You and I could have breakfast at Sarah Bass in Central Park South today and do like a four hour conversation on this moment at hand. I got Brent Crude under $60 a barrel.

Global slowdown, U.S. slowdown, is that what you model in? Yeah, I think what we're seeing now is there was a lot of debate in the onset of the escalation of the trade war as to whether the growth hit would come first or the inflation pop would come first. And it looks like the growth hit may be coming first. So, Liz, we've got the S&P 500. I mean, the good news, bad news. Bad news is we're down 10% from the high earlier in the year. But the good news is we're 10% higher from the bottom. What do you make of this?

What do you think we should be doing here? I think what we're seeing in the month of April, particularly since the low, is a sign that the retail trader is still very active. They're still in the buy the dip.

mentality. You've got tech back in the leaderboard on a month-to-date basis, even though it's toward the bottom on a year-to-date basis. Vandatrack tracks what retail traders are doing, and that's in stark contrast to hedge funds and other institutions and CTAs that have been going more risk-off. And then when you see something, Goldman Sachs has those great indexes and baskets, and they're

Their meme stock basket has been soaring in the last month, too. Another proxy for retail traders. What do you make here of earnings? We're almost halfway through the earnings cycle. I see a lot of companies probably doing what I would do, which is like, I don't know what's going on out there. So I'm going to pull my guidance or give you some ranges or some scenarios. What are you taking away from earnings? I think companies have put themselves into timeout. You know, earnings so far for first quarter, a little bit better than expected.

not quite the beat rate that we've seen over the last year or so, but that's through March data. So it's the guidance or lack thereof that I think is really important. And it is starting to feel a little bit like the early stages of the pandemic when at that time you had a record percentage of companies just pull guidance altogether. Is institutional under-owned in the MagS7 that retail owns up to their eyeballs?

In many cases, yes, because of certain funds' requirements that they have a max on the amount they can hold percentage-wise in any individual stock. Even some of the sector exchange-traded funds are limited. So they, by default, couldn't get

Couldn't have developed the same concentration problem as what was embedded in cap weighted indexes. Our conversation today on the equity markets, Lizanne Saunders with us from Charles Schwab.

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