S&P 500 will hit 7,000

Jim Edwards is the executive editor for global news at Fortune. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Business Insider's news division and the founding editor of Business Insider UK. His investigative journalism has changed the law in two U.S. federal districts and two states. The U.S. Supreme Court cited his work on the death penalty in the concurrence to Baze v. Rees, the ruling on whether lethal injection is cruel or unusual. He also won the Neal award for an investigation of bribes and kickbacks on Madison Avenue.

It’s bad out there. Russia is flying bombs over Poland, shutting down its airports. Israel conducted a missile strike on Hamas in Doha, even though Qatar is a Western ally. And the U.S. government revised down its employment numbers, revealing there are nearly 1 million fewer jobs in the economy than previously thought. And don’t forget the trade war.

So, obviously, S&P 500 futures are up 0.25% this morning and the underlying index closed at yet another record high yesterday, up 0.27% at 6,512.61.

Stock investors love trouble, it seems!

“S&P 500 has delivered a 31% gain since the April 9th lows, the best 5 month performance in roughly two decades outside of a recession,” according to JPMorgan’s Dubravko Lakos-Bujas.

What’s happening is that stocks are climbing “the wall of worry,” he told clients in a note this morning. The wall of worry is a cliché that describes the notion that investors like hearing bad news because they can price it in and leave it in the rearview mirror—investing is about what you think will happen in the future, not what happened in the past.

Thus Lakos-Bujas has a new target for the S&P: 7,000. But the climb upward will be rocky, he says: “Short-term caution (S&P 500 downside to 6,000-6,200); medium-term further upside (7,000

He’s not alone. Piper Sandler’s Nancy Lazar has been talking about the wall of worry for weeks. “Yes, that’s a cliché, but it sure describes today’s eco environment,” she told clients last month.

Both agree broadly on what is driving stocks upward. AI, increased capital expenditure

The capex wave is “not limited to the AI boom,” Piper’s Lazar said. It’s “increasingly driven

Here’s a snapshot of the markets globally this morning: