This bull market has room to run

Markets have spent much of 2026 pushed and pulled between recession fears, tariff panic, geopolitical conflict, and nonstop debates about whether the AI trade has gone too far. Yet despite it all, stocks continue pushing toward new highs.

To help us make sense of the rally, we spoke with Ryan Detrick, Chief Market Strategist at Carson Group and co-host of the investing podcast Facts vs Feelings. Detrick has remained consistently bullish throughout this year’s volatility, arguing that investors continue underestimating both the resilience of the economy and the market’s ability to adapt.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Amid all the volatility and uncertainty, which parts of the market are you most concerned about?

We still think this is a bull market, and we’ve been pretty vocal about that. But inflation is still a problem.

When we look at CPI, PCE, and different variations of inflation, we still think it’s running a little hotter than the Fed wants. I'm going to say it’s broadening out. Services inflation remains stubbornly high, goods inflation has been picking back up, and we think it’s more of a 3% inflation world than a 2% inflation world right now.

To be clear, that’s not the end of the world, but it probably makes it harder for the Fed to cut rates as aggressively as the market once hoped.

At the same time, one of our bigger worries is investors panicking during volatility spikes. Just look at recent years: After the regional banking crisis, the market still finished 2023 up roughly 25%. After the yen carry trade panic, the market finished 2024 up roughly 24%. Last year, tariffs and liberation day and all that stuff pushed the market down almost 20%. At the end of the year, the market was still up 18%.

Do you still think technology stocks have room to run?

The short answer is yes.

The Mag 7 still isn’t even back to all-time highs yet. Most of those stocks are still well off their highs. Are they getting closer? Sure. But this whole setup honestly feels eerily similar to what we saw last year.

Last year around this time, everybody was worried about DeepSeek—this cheap Chinese knockoff that was supposedly going to take away all the AI spending. It almost sounds laughable now, right? But tech got crushed. Some of those names were down 30%, 40%. Then you blink, and tech came roaring back in the second half of the year because earnings stayed strong, profit margins stayed strong, and AI spending kept ramping.

And we look at things now, and honestly it feels really similar.

I love looking at extremes. I traded options for about 12 years before moving into more of the money management world, and one thing you learn is when everybody agrees on one side of the trade, a lot of that’s already priced in. Usually the opportunity is somewhere on the other side.

This bull market, in our opinion, probably has a couple years left, and it’s going to be volatile, but this is just another opportunity. We still like growth. We still like industrials. We still like banks and financials and those cyclical areas tied to an economy that we think is probably still going to do pretty well in the second half of the year. Those are the areas you probably want to be overweight equities.

What’s your view on AI disruption fears in software?

I can talk about that one all day.

There are companies now facing legitimate pressure because AI can suddenly do tasks in seconds that previously required expensive software platforms. There’s a reason many software stocks got cut in half, if not more. But at the same time, about a year ago a lot of those names were down a lot on AI worries about DeepSeek. Some of those companies are in trouble, yes, but a lot of them aren’t. And investors were throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Software became as cheap relative to the S&P 500 as it had been since 2014. Meanwhile, many of these companies still had strong earnings and solid businesses underneath the surface.

Catching a falling knife is dangerous. But if you’re buying companies that still make a lot of money and still have strong earnings underneath the surface, eventually those opportunities can matter.

So yes, we are still slightly overweight technology. We own software names, and we think a lot of those areas could bounce back in a big way in the second half of this year.

How much of the Iran conflict do you think markets have already priced in?

For all intents and purposes, the market’s looked past it already.

Historically, geopolitical conflicts can hit markets in the short term, but if the economy avoids a recession, markets usually adjust pretty quickly. One month later markets are often lower, but three months later they’re usually positive, and six months later they’re doing fine. Right now, the market is sniffing out record earnings, strong profit margins, continued strong AI rollouts and AI spending.

Another thing is the Fed. A couple months ago everybody thought the Fed was going to cut rates multiple times. Then inflation broadened out, the war happened, and suddenly people started worrying the Fed might actually hike again. We never really bought into that. We’re not calling the Fed dovish, but it’s not hawkish either.

Then you add in still-solid earnings, a pretty good economy, and a strong labor market. Over the last three months we got over 68,000 jobs. We’re pretty optimistic that the labor market is going to improve a little bit in the second half of this year, and that’s just another positive layer to all the stuff going on to keep the consumer in fairly good shape.

You’re obviously pretty bullish on the economy. How is the US different and what makes the US economy so resilient?

I don’t know if the US is much different. I just think the economy today is incredibly agile.

Back in the day about 50 years ago the economy was much more manufacturing-based. When bad things happened and things shut down, it took a long time to open back up. What we’ve really seen since Covid is just how quickly huge companies can readjust.

For the last three years, people have been saying profit margins have to go lower because of all sorts of reasons. And yet profit margins have continued moving higher. Corporate profits have continued moving higher. It’s amazing how resilient our economy is.

At the same time, it’s not just a US story either.

Europe grew around 2% last year. That might not sound great, but at the start of the year people expected Europe to basically be flat. We’ve also seen developed international market earnings and emerging market earnings really improve over the last six months. That’s one reason we still think the rest of the globe can do pretty well too.—SY