Lazard, Inc. (LAZ) Stock Forecasts

Summary

The first five trading days of the third quarter have featured some selling in certain mega-cap technology names. Also under pressure are some of the big banks that had ripped higher off their April lows. The biggest losers of late have been the already-suffering healthcare providers. We have seen some emerging outperformance by the S&P MidCap 400 as well as the S&P SmallCap 600 since the quarter began. Since March 2023, the mid- and small-cap indices have underperformed the large-cap S&P 500. Sooner or later, the law of "regression to the mean" will kick in. However, with the AI boom and its related larger-cap beneficiaries, this time may be different, at least for the foreseeable future. On Tuesday, we talked about a few sentiment indicators that finally moved in an optimistic direction, but not enough to wave the contrarian red flag. Interestingly, though, while the FOMO trade is in full swing, the "smart money" corporate insiders have increased their distribution of stock. Who better to evaluate their own stock than top execs? Sentiment among corporate insiders, according to Vickers Stock Research, has been cautious for several weeks, but now has taken a