Investment guru Laszlo Birinyi remains optimistic about stocks, despite his disappointment with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comments at June 22’s Fed press conference.

 

"We’re still positive. We can always have corrections,” the president of Birinyi Associates told CNBC. "We’re in a long-term bull market, and just as we always do, we have periods where we slow down and stop."

 

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has slipped 7 percent since peaking April 29.

 

Birinyi says he was "disappointed with some of the language and the tone" of Bernanke during his press conference Wednesday. The central bank chief said there isn’t much the Fed can do for the economy at this point.

 

Meanwhile, Ken Fisher, chief executive of Fisher Investment, told CNBC he’s still "not wildly optimistic" about U.S. stocks this year.

 

He’s more enthusiastic about emerging markets. "When you look around the world, emerging market countries are actually cumulatively bigger than America's economy, and growing pretty darn nicely," Fisher said. "In every economic expansion some countries lead, some countries lag. Right now we're in the middle of the pack. We in America are so used to being the leaders we have a hard time with it when we're not."

 

Some investors, of course, are more bearish about U.S. stocks. “It’s extraordinarily discouraging,” Randy Bateman, chief investment officer of Huntington Asset Management, tells Bloomberg. “We’re just ending QE2, and the intent of that was to build employment and sustain the economy. That hasn’t accomplished half of those objectives.”