They had us in the first half
That's a wrap for the first half of the year.
And it was one to forget for equity investors, as the flagship S&P 500 Index declined 20.6% in value, putting 2022 off to the worst start for 52 years, when the index fell 21% in 1970. Before that you have to go back to 1962 when stocks fell 23.5% in the first half of the year — a crash which became known as the Kennedy Slide.
Where do we go from here?
The stock market is not the economy, but investors do try to anticipate what's coming down the road — and JPMorgan analysts suggested a few weeks ago that the movement in stocks implies an 85% chance that the US economy does go into recession — and some high-profile investors already think we're in one.
Trying to predict what stock markets do next is a notoriously humbling endeavor, but the historical data is reasonably optimistic. Of the 23 times that stocks have fallen in the first half of the year they've gone on to rise in the second half of the year on 12 occasions.
