How long can the bull market continue? More experts are now saying stocks have entered a long-term bull market.
Investors who’ve been cautiously waiting on the platform are now jumping on the train before they’re left behind. Those new riders will continue to push the market higher, predicts Laszlo Birinyi, founder and president of Birinyi Associates, according to CNNMoney.
That’s how it usually works, he says. A rising market attracts more investors, which, in turn, prompt an even stronger market. Stocks often increase the most near the end of bull markets. The Standard & Poor’s 500 skyrocketed 40 percent in its final phases of the last bull markets. Birinyi believes the current bull market entered the final stage last summer.
Editor's Note: See the Disturbing Charts: 50% Unemployment, 90% Stock Market Crash, 100% Inflation
The S&P 500, up almost 8 percent in the current bull market, could set a record high this year and the bull market could last another year or two, Birinyi told CNNMoney.
“When we see that everyone is bullish and is able to articulate it, we know the top is near,” Birinyi says. “People are positive, but not quite bullish yet. Wall Street is forecasting a gain of 8 percent or 9 percent this year, not 15 percent or 20 percent.”
Some experts, citing the recent large inflow of money from individual investors, fear the market may be near its peak. Small investors, who are often unsophisticated, they say, usually jump into stocks en masse near the top. Yet the recent inflows follow years of investors holding back from stocks.
“A couple of weeks of inflow is just a drop in the bucket, so you can’t possibly make the case that we’re at the point that we need to ring the warning bells and start to worry,” Bill Stone of PNC Wealth Management told CNNMoney. “There’s still a lot of money out there to come back, and we’re nowhere near the point where everyone is back to buying stocks.”
“There’s a 25 percent possibility we’re in a new secular bull market, and no one believes it,” Jeffrey Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond James, told Barron’s.
“We are pretty optimistic that the next three to five years are going to be fine,” agrees Sarat Sethi, a partner at Douglas C. Lane & Associates, according to Barron’s. Investors, Sethi says, should see returns in the high-single digits to 10 percent.
Editor's Note: See the Disturbing Charts: 50% Unemployment, 90% Stock Market Crash, 100% Inflation
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