federal reserve: Taper no grounds for tantrum to stock bulls wielding $28 billion

Research from UBS Group AG says that should the Federal Reserve turn off the spigot on its annual $1.4 trillion in quantitative-easing spending, the hit to the S&P 500 Index would be a 3% decline in prices. That’s a relatively paltry headwind for companies whose combined earnings growth analysts put at roughly 10% in each of the next two years.
While the precision of such forecasts is famously squishy, they could be framed as justifying some of the resolve retail investors have evinced over a period of steadily rising Fed hawkishness. Stock bulls just pumped $28 billion into equity exchange-traded funds in the past week, about three times the 2021 average, data compiled by Bloomberg show.