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Stocks remained near highs on Thursday.
Wellington-Altus’s chief market strategist says the S&P 500 could climb about 15% by the spring of 2026.
President Donald Trump “has reset the economic cycle, setting the stage for a historic rally,” he wrote.
But market watchers aren’t unanimous about the road ahead. A technical strategist thinks one sector’s rise signals a seasonal slowdown.
Like banging the top of an old TV set could clear up static, Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcement, which spooked markets in early April, might’ve been the hard reset needed to pave the way for stocks to keep rising.
But with the U.S. indexes already around highs, some watchers think the possibility of a correction is impossible to ignore.
The first argument is the case Jim Thorne, chief market strategist at Canadian investment firm Wellington-Altus, made in what he called the “new American framework” in a report published Tuesday. The S&P 500 could reach 7,500 by the spring of next year, Thorne wrote, implying upside of about 15% from recent levels. As tariff policy evolved after Liberation Day, strategists who’d pulled back S&P 500 targets turned optimistic again.
The rally, however, has some observers wary: Fundstrat’s head of technical strategy Mark Newton on Tuesday wrote that the S&P 500 could experience resistance after joining the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ), an ETF tracking the Nasdaq 100 index, at all-time highs.
Market breadth, a technical indicator used to measure market momentum, has declined since mid-July, and defensive sectors, like staples, have been advancing. The latter, Newton said, is what technical analysts tend to see before a correction.
But the U.S., Thorne argues, is “at the crossroads of fiscal transformation, technological upheaval, and a reawakening of pragmatic innovation.” That, he says, means “the chorus of Wall Street elites and bond vigilantes—those ‘reasonable’ guardians of orthodoxy—suddenly find their well-worn complaints losing traction. The unreasonable innovators, meanwhile, are busy rewriting the rules. The upshot—smart investors don’t complain, they just adapt and ignore the noise.”
An example, Thorne writes: the crypto space, which is evolving quickly, aided by regulatory clarity that is helping demand for bitcoin but also other digital assets. Wall Street and the broader financial system is getting revamped, he said; indeed, fintech platforms have started to roll out tokenized stocks, while retailers like Walmart (WMT) and Amazon (AMZN) are reportedly exploring their own stablecoins, the crypto industry’s answer to payments.
Thorne advised investors to ignore “fear-driven narratives” and position for growth with more exposure to sectors and companies in artificial intelligence, blockchain, tokenization, industrials, as well as digital asset infrastructure and financials.
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