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Nuveen CIO Saira Malik: Decoding the stock market's post-'Liberation Day' rally

Tue, May 6, 2025, 11:49 AM 2 min read

"I think there's two reasons for [the rally]. Number one, when markets tend to go down quickly, they actually recover quickly. So history did repeat itself. And number two, I think 'Liberation Day' was peak tariff pain, and we've seen a lot of negotiating since then, and I think markets are starting to appreciate that," Nuveen chief investment officer Saira Malik told Yahoo Finance at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Tuesday (video above).

Malik leads a business with more than $1 trillion in assets under management. She has spent decades in the financial services industry, starting at JPMorgan Asset Management in 1995.

Malik continued, "I'll throw in first quarter earnings season expectations. We were looking for 6% earnings growth coming into this quarter. We're at currently about 12%. So it's been a strong earnings season. Not a strong outlook season, but a strong earnings season."

Investors appear to leaning more into earnings beats in the here and now rather than future earnings misses should Trump tariffs begin to bite in the second quarter, as economists expect.

Strong first quarter earnings reports from Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT) in the past two weeks have powered the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) to a 13.5% gain over the past month. That's despite the likes of Apple (AAPL) warning that the Trump tariffs would hit its cost base to the tune of $900 million.

On Monday, the S&P 500 snapped a nine-day winning streak. It marked the longest winning streak for stocks dating back to 2004. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) also ended a nine-day winning streak, its best since 2023.

All three major indexes are in the negative for the year, however, with the Nasdaq leading with an 8.5% drop.

Malik said it's not the time to hoard cash — despite the Trump administration's policy unknowns — as investors can get high-single-digit returns in fixed-income and high-yield corporate bonds.

"You're not going to earn that in cash, and the returns for cash are going to deteriorate as the Fed lowers rates. I think cash is obviously a great asset class and something to hold for expenses that you need and for emergencies. But you can outearn cash in areas of fixed income and equities," Malik said.

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