Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel says the stock market still has 8% upside — and highlights where investors should put their money to capitalize

• The stock market still has 8% upside through the rest of 2024, according to Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel.

• Siegel said comparisons of today’s stock market to the dot-com bubble in 1999 are overblown.

• Here’s the big stock market opportunity Siegel thinks investors should capitalize on this year.

It’s no secret that Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel is bullish on the stock market, and the S&P 500 hitting the psychological 5000 level isn’t deterring him from his positive views.

In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, Siegel said the S&P 500 could surge another 8% from current levels through the end of the year, which would put the index at about 5,400.

That forecast lines up with the most bullish stock market outlooks on Wall Street.

Siegel’s bullishness comes as some investment strategists compare today’s stock market to the peak valuations seen during the dot-com bubble in 1999 and 2000, but Siegel isn’t convinced.

“It’s not worse than 1999,” Siegel said. “One thing is very very different, and this is important, we had S&P selling at 30 times earnings at the beginning of 2000, and the tech sector even far more than that, 60/70 times earnings. And by the way, interest rates were higher than they are today. Today, we’re selling at 20 times earnings, now that’s not cheap, but certainly it is not a situation like 1999 or 2000.”

Siegel said that investors should focus on buying value stocks and small-cap stocks, which sell at 15 times and 12 times earnings, respectively, as they could finally start to outperform large-cap stocks.

“I’m not saying that the large [cap stocks] are going to crash or anything like that. But if you’re talking about how bad things are concentrated on the top, well that means there are opportunities on the other side, and that’s really where I do think the better gains are going to be over the next three to five years,” Siegel said.

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And while there are ongoing risks in the stock market that investors should be worried about, from commercial real estate to the recent implosion of New York Community Bancorp, that doesn’t mean investors shouldn’t buy stocks, according to Siegel.

“One of the oldest sayings on Wall Street: stocks climb the wall of worry. If you wait until all the worries are gone, and the sky is clear, you bought at the top, not the bottom. We are persistently in an age of uncertainty and threats, all the time, and the stock market has been in that since its existence,” Siegel said.

Read the original article on Business Insider