S&P 500 to hit 2,225 by year-end: Strategist
Despite the recent turbulence in the market, one strategist is sticking by his bold call that the S&P 500 (^GSPC) will end the year at 2,225.
That's more than 10 higher from its current level.
"What you're seeing the last couple of weeks is a bottoming process," Julian Emanuel, U.S. equity and derivatives strategist at UBS, said Thursday.
"People are waiting for conditions to get better and the money will come in. There's a very pronounced tendency for fourth quarters to be good because people do look ahead to the next year, where we see an earnings recovery that's going to drive the market higher."
That said, investors should get used to volatility because it's going to continue, he told CNBC's " Power Lunch ."
U.S. stocks traded in a narrow range Thursday, a day after the S&P 500 and Nasdaq (^IXIC) closed out of correction territory to within 10 percent of their 52-week highs. On Tuesday, the market had its worst start to September in 13 years.
As for those who are worried about stocks entering a bear market, Emanuel said that won't happen.
"There has not been a bear market over the last 25 years without a recession and the economy is simply too strong now, whether you look at it in terms of jobs, housing or confidence," he said.
Market technician Mark Newton isn't quite as bullish. In fact, nothing in the charts suggests the selloff is over, he said.
"None of the reasons for the selloff over the last couple weeks have dissipated in the last couple days to think 'OK, everything is over' either from a technical or a fundamental perspective," the chief technical analyst at Greywolf Execution Partners told "Power Lunch."
He believes the S&P 500 will have to go back to 2,044 before there is real confidence that the worst is behind the market.
"Until that happens it is merely a little bit of a bounce within an ongoing decline," Newton added.
He thinks the S&P could fall down to 1,820 and possibly 1,680.
Fund manager Margaret Vitrano also anticipates more volatility ahead. However, she thinks it creates an opportunity to buy good large-cap companies to own over the next several years.
Specifically, Vitrano likes Adobe (ADBE), which she thinks has a lot of runway left due to the several million people who have not yet shifted to its subscription model. Such a model is harder to pirate, she said.
"That shift from a licensed model to a subscription model is going to be a nice tail wind for them to start to capture some lost revenue that they haven't been able to generate in the past," Vitrano, manager of the Morningstar four-star rated ClearBridge Investments Large Cap Growth fund (NASDAQ:SBLYX-O), said on "Power Lunch."
Another name on her list is American Express (AXP), which she said has been good at cutting costs over the last couple of years and has room for margin expansion.
"We like the U.S. consumer. It's one of the few bright spots out there. American Express is a nice derivative play on the U.S. consumer because more half their revenue comes from U.S. consumer spending," she added.
She also likes Google (GOOGL).
-CNBC's Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.
Disclosure: SBLYX owns Adobe, American Express and Google.
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