Investment guru Leon Cooperman said he is finding “tremendous value” in many stocks right now amid the market plunge.
The Omega Advisors founder told CNBC he doesn’t really see any signs of a lasting bear market and urged savvy investors to buy "their favorite stocks" while prices are falling.
"Don't favor the notion that we are headed into a bear market. Own your favorite stocks, hold cash, limit your holding of bonds and keep the maturity shorter than average,” he said.
“A bear market is not just a price decline in a short period of time. There's plenty to worry about, but I'm still finding a tremendous amount of value in the market," Cooperman said.
A bear market is commonly defined as a drop of 20 percent or more from recent highs.
“To me, I’m going to have a combination of cash and stocks…even take a long-duration asset like Google, which has over $100 billion cash in the balance sheet...20 times earnings. I think that’s better than cash in my way of thinking,” he added.
To be sure, Goldman Sachs warns that volatility is likely to persist in the year ahead.
Volatility has more than doubled this year from near historic lows in major exchange-traded funds tracking U.S. equity indexes and sectors, bringing it closer to long-term averages, Goldman derivative strategists Katherine Fogertey and John Marshall wrote in a note.
Overall, single-stock options prices imply a continuation of those levels in 2019, which are “not extreme by any means,” they wrote, according to Bloomberg.
The relative calm that had characterized the stock market for five years was broken as everything from North Korean nuclear threats to the U.S.-China trade war and concerns that corporate earnings growth has peaked whipsawed investors.
While looking to 2019, they see an unusually low premium for put options on the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF Trust, VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF and Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR Fund indicating that investors are less worried about downside risks.
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