CFRA's Stovall: Market will 'surprise' investors for the rest of this year

Sam Stovall, chief market strategist for CFRA Research, says that he expects the stock market to surprise investors in 2024 "the way it did in 2023," producing the kind of double-digit gains that are typical of the second year of a bull market. Once the market gets into the third year of the current bull run -- in 2025, after the presidential election -- he expects a turn because "that's when bull markets tend to die an early death." Stovall notes that while he thinks the market could take a pause or minor correction before resuming its climb, he expects leadership to change from large caps -- which he says are trading at a 30 percent premium to the Standard & Poor's 500 average price/earnings ratio over the last 20 years -- to small and mid-cap stocks, which have been trading at a steep discount. Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at VettaFi, picks a specialized sector play -- the VictoryShares WestEnd U.S. Sector fund -- as his ETF of the Week, and Cullen Roche, chief investment officer at the Discipline Funds, talks exchange-traded funds in the Market Call.