Wall Street Firms Raise Stock Target: Your Next Move

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**Scott Wapner** (1:00)
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All right guys, thanks so much. Welcome to the Halftime Report. I'm Scott Wapner, front and center this hour, higher targets for stocks. That is the story again today. Our firms are joining the 8,000 Club and beyond. We'll tell you who's lifting their outlooks now. We'll trade a big Apple downgrade as well. Joining me for the hour today, Joe Terranova, Kerry Firestone, Anastasia Amoroso and Jim Labanthal. Let's check the markets here. S&P is green. Everything else is red. So we are at record highs. We have been. We're coming off the best week since April. Those guys were just talking about CPI on Wednesday. It's going to be a big event, obviously, with the Fed very much in focus. Oil has been higher. Yields are up a little bit. You have 522 on the 30 year. Keep an eye on that. We certainly are. And then the other numbers that matter. JP Morgan goes to 8000, joining the club of what is a growing number of members. So there's your 30 year. So JPM is now at 8000 Why earnings growth?
Seemingly why everybody else continues to raise their targets, too. Evercore today says the odds of a bull case to 9000 are rising as well. Tony Pascarello Goldman Sachs says both the fundamental backdrop and the technicals support a broader continuation of the bull trend.
All that, positioning is cleaner, de-leveraging happened, gross leverage is down a bunch, de-grossing from hedge funds has taken place. So you got a cleaner outlook and that's one of the reasons why people are feeling pretty bullish across the board.

**Joe Terranova** (2:43)
And it's steady as we go.
The market continues to move higher, built upon phenomenal earnings, historic earnings when you really go back and study the last seven quarters. 8,000, I think that's kind of a foregone conclusion.

**Scott Wapner** (2:58)
Kind of feels like it, right?

**Joe Terranova** (2:59)
Kind of feels like it. Here comes 9,000, I don't know, Scott, 10,000 by December of 2027 Why not? I think the market could get there if we continue to have this type of earnings growth. So, I really like a lot of the notes, and Tony Pasquarello's note was excellent, just talking about how we've seen positioning reshape itself. You've seen the deleveraging. That allows you to rebuild once again in the bull market. I think that's what we're seeing. In the moment it's about alpha generation, what's interesting about today, and you know the JTETF at the end of July went to 10% waiting for energy. Well, today we're getting rewarded for that. We're seeing a lot of capital flowing into energy today. If you look at the 11 Spider ETFs, energy is actually seeing the strongest volume today. So the alpha generation opportunity might just be an energy in the near term, because of a lot of positioning stepped away from it. But overall, the market's in a good place.

**Scott Wapner** (3:57)
We haven't heard from you, Kerry, in a minute.
So there's a lot of bullishness, obviously, because earnings have been really strong, and the estimates are that it's gonna remain very much the same way. Are you as bullish as the others are now, seemingly, how they've gotten?

**Kerry Firestone** (4:13)
Well, I think that it's great to be bullish right here. We had that pullback in June, July.
That could happen if we get the market up another five, six percent, because people will talk about, now the market's a little bit ahead of itself. But what we've got going for us right now is that we finished earnings season, great numbers. I mean, high double digits, I mean, in the 20 percent range. You've got more retail engagement. The retail buyer is the individuals are 25 percent of the market, where they were five percent, you know, 25 years ago.