Investors should prepare to buy market pullbacks: Strategist

The US economy added 254,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate ticked slightly lower to 4.1%. This better-than-expected report brought positive news to Wall Street, giving stocks (^DJI,^GSPC, ^IXIC) a slight lift Friday morning. Scott Wren, Wells Fargo Investment Institute senior global market strategist, joins Morning Brief to discuss how investors can best navigate the market ahead. “It’s tough, at least for us, to chase this equity market. And as I said, we’re Underweight long-term fixed income because we just think rates are too low, and they are going to go higher. So I think right now, you have to be patient,” Wren tells Yahoo Finance. He notes that now may be a good time to pull out of some of the top-performing sectors, like utilities (XLU) and real estate (XLRE). Instead, he encourages rotating into areas like industrials (XLI), materials (XLB), and financials (XLF). Wren adds, “You have to be ready when you get these corrections that inevitably come. You need to be ready to pull the trigger and step in. So the outlook, if you have a three, four, five plus year outlook, you need to be buying on pullbacks here, because in our opinion, you’re moving towards a more modest growth, modest inflation type of an environment over time that tends to be good for stocks.” With that backdrop in mind, he does not expect a recession in the US. However, he believes there will be uncertainty as the Federal Reserve continues adjusting interest rates and with rising tensions in the Middle East. Thus, investors should be ready to buy any pullbacks ahead.