Vocal stock market bull Ed Yardeni says even he hasn’t been bullish enough.

The president of Yardeni Research notes in a new CNBC interview that the current market feels like the “roaring 2020s.”

In a previous interview earlier this month, Yardeni raised his year-end target for the S&P 500 to 8,250. When asked on Monday whether he was considering raising that target again, the veteran strategist sounded an optimistic tune.

“I’ve been among the bulls and I haven’t been bullish enough. I mean it’s really extraordinary. We’ve been in what I call not a FOMO market but a FEMO market, meaning ‘Fabulous Earnings Momentum.’ Earnings have been unbelievably strong.”

Yardeni says he’d rather have an earnings-driven melt-up than a valuation-driven melt-up. He also outlines the resilience of the market despite geopolitical headwinds.

“That’s been one of our theses, is that you just don’t want to ignore and underestimate the resilience of the US economy and the US consumer, and I think a lot of that is because of me and people like me, which is a lot of Baby Boomers. I’m still working for a living, but the Baby Boomers are retiring with $89 trillion in net worth. We’re talking about awesome numbers.” 

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BlackRock chief investment officer Rick Rieder believes that the bull run in US equities will continue, driven by higher earnings estimates.

In a new interview at the CNBC CEO Council Summit, Rieder says the market is in the midst of an “extraordinary period of time” as stock prices rise while earnings multiples fall.

While Rieder mentions a few market risks, he says the earnings growth story is fueling the market’s ascent to new all-time high levels.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this in terms of you’ve got a market that’s doing extremely well. The cash keeps coming into these markets. And the multiples, though, when you actually look at it relative to where you were, particularly in tech and semis, are actually lower than where we were if you go back to October.

The earnings growth, I was looking this morning at the projected [one-year forward] earnings growth, talking about 20%-plus earnings growth. That is incredible. So yes, there’s a lot of uncertainty. Yes, there are things to be careful about. I worry about crowding in different markets, not just in overall markets, but in single-name stocks where you see more crowding, more momentum trading than I’ve ever seen before.”

The BlackRock CIO says he’s keeping a close watch on the Magnificent 7 names, highlighting that their valuations are justified due to exceptional earnings growth.

“I was looking at the Mag 7. I mean, you’re talking about a 26x multiple for companies that are throwing off earnings growth of 30%-40%.

So yes, there’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a tremendous amount of cash. There’s a tremendous amount, even with the IPO calendar, which is large. There is still a tremendous amount of buyback going on. So I think the technicals are good. Listen, I think you’ve got to stay in it. And I think the equity market will probably continue to do okay.”

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A Bank of America strategist is sounding the alarm about the stock market, warning that equities are flashing signals that have often foreshadowed a 20% correction.

In an investor note, BofA’s head of US equity and quantitative strategy, Savita Subramanian, urges investors to “take profits,” warning that she’s seeing “too many red flags” in the market, reports Axios.

“Our bear market signposts — the triggers that typically precede an S&P 500 peak — suggest additional caution may be warranted. Today, 70% of our signposts are triggered, in line with the average observed in prior market peaks.”

Subramanian says the signposts are market condition gauges, including the investor assumption that companies will continue to generate profits at a strong pace in the coming years, as well as relaxed credit conditions. She also highlights that she’s seeing very high dispersion in the performance of stocks with high and low price-to-equity ratios, meaning high-valuation stocks are being rewarded, while low-valuation stocks are being left behind.

“Dispersion has been most pronounced within Tech, where the spread between the best/worst-performing quintiles’ median stock is a whopping +120 [percentage points], the highest since Feb. 2000, which reached +130 [percentage points] ahead of the market peak of March 24, 2000.”

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley CIO Mike Wilson says he doesn’t believe that the stock market will enter bear territory. He says, “In our view, a correction was inevitable and ultimately healthy if this bull market is going to extend into year-end, which remains our baseline.”

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The brokerage, investing and financial advisory arm of Wells Fargo is highlighting one market sector that could benefit immensely from growing investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers.

Wells Fargo Advisors says that the current stock market performance is being driven by investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers. According to Wells Fargo Advisors, utilities are one of the key beneficiaries of this burgeoning investment.

“As a key supplier in the data center landscape, the Utilities sector is riding this demand wave and has produced strong returns, a trend we expect to continue.”

Wells Fargo Advisors says that electric utilities are “likely to see the greatest data center benefit” relative to other subsectors.

“As owners of power generation and distribution assets, utilities — electric utilities in particular — stand to benefit from this long-term infrastructure buildout. In fact, many have already raised long-term annual earnings growth outlooks into the high-single- to low-double-digit range. When paired with 2% to 3% dividend yields, this supports attractive total return prospects, in our view.”

Besides electric utilities, Wells Fargo Advisors says other utility subsectors are also going to benefit, but on a reduced scale.

“Electric utilities, however, do not have a monopoly on data center power demand. Natural gas distributors (also utilities), producers (energy companies), and pipeline operators are also benefiting by supplying fuel or building on-site power generation at data center campuses.”

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Ripple is pushing its dollar-backed stablecoin into Turkey, betting that one of the world’s most active digital-asset markets is ready for a more regulated version of the digital dollars already used to navigate currency weakness and limited access to traditional dollar savings.

On June 2, the Brad Garlinghouse-led company announced that its US dollar-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD, is now available to institutional clients in Turkey through integration agreements with local cryptocurrency platforms BiLira, Bitexen, and Bitlo.

The stakes for capturing market share are exceptionally high. Turkey handled nearly $200 billion in annual crypto transactions, almost four times the United Arab Emirates’ $53 billion, making it the dominant crypto economy in the Middle East and North Africa, according to blockchain data firm Chainalysis.

Ripple targets Turkey’s dollar demand

The rollout places RLUSD inside the domestic order books of three established Turkish gateways.

Ripple executives are aggressively targeting corporate and institutional liquidity, positioning the token as a compliance-first alternative to incumbent stablecoins that currently dominate the offshore market.

Since its global launch in late 2024, RLUSD has scaled to a $1.7 billion market capitalization. Ripple’s strategy in Turkey focuses not on retail day traders, but on capturing high-value corporate flows that require strict regulatory certainty.

Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoins at Ripple, noted that the asset is designed to serve as a bridge for enterprise operations. He noted:

“RLUSD has rapidly gained traction in financial use cases, serving as a vital bridge for payments, tokenization, and collateral management.”

By integrating directly with domestic service providers such as BiLira, Bitexen, and Bitlo, Ripple provides a regulated entry point for domestic institutions that require stringent audit standards to hold digital dollars on their corporate balance sheets or to use them for cross-border supplier payments.

Mustafa Alpay, CEO at Bitlo, said:

“[Turkey crypto] users are looking for secure, digital-native means to manage their wealth and hedge against volatility. By integrating a regulated, enterprise-grade stablecoin like RLUSD, we’re providing our customers with the highest standard of digital dollars for enterprise needs.”

Market shaped by domestic pressure

Meanwhile, market observers have noted that Turkey’s outsized role in the global crypto ecosystem is not solely the result of typical retail speculation.

Instead, it sits at the intersection of speculative trading, robust dollar demand, and profound macroeconomic pressure.

According to Chainalysis, Turkey completely dominates the MENA region in digital asset value received.

More recently, data from TRM Labs showed that Turkey rose to become the fifth-largest global market for retail crypto activity in the first quarter of 2026.

The report showed that Turkey generated $40 billion in crypto volume during that three-month period while broader global retail participation contracted by 11%.

This made Turkey one of the few major global markets to expand during a quarter contraction driven by macroeconomic tightening and reduced retail participation.

For a nominal $1.64 trillion economy, the velocity of capital moving into stablecoins and digital assets reflects deep structural challenges.

With the Turkish lira facing persistent devaluation and domestic monetary environments remaining constrained, dollar-denominated crypto assets have become a functional rail for capital preservation.

However, labeling the market solely as a vehicle of economic necessity misses the full picture.

The high transaction volumes reflect a dual-track digital economy: while some users and corporations rely on digital dollars to hedge against inflation and manage working capital, a massive segment of the market remains highly engaged in speculative trading across decentralized networks.

Turkey’s crypto regulatory effort gives Ripple an opening

Ripple’s entry into Turkey is timed against a backdrop of shifting sovereign oversight. As Turkey tightens supervision of its digital asset sector, global firms offering compliance-heavy products are finding a clearer route into the market.

The regulatory environment shifted fundamentally in July 2024, when amendments to the Capital Markets Law introduced stringent licensing requirements for crypto asset service providers operating within the country.

The Capital Markets Board effectively forced platforms to either formalize their operations, enhance trade surveillance, or exit the jurisdiction.

That oversight is now extending aggressively into taxation. In March 2026, Reuters reported that Turkey’s ruling AK Party proposed comprehensive legislation to levy a 10% withholding tax on crypto gains realized on authorized platforms, along with a 0.03% transaction levy on service providers.

By structuring tax collection at the exchange level and requiring platforms to act as fiduciary withholding agents that calculate and remit taxes quarterly, the Turkish government is cementing the role of licensed domestic exchanges while heavily penalizing the use of offshore alternatives.

Speaking on this, Reece Merrick, a senior executive officer at Ripple, said:

“The foundations are in place for Türkiye to double down on its position as one of the world’s most dynamic digital asset markets.

For a company like Ripple, which builds its product suite around institutional compliance and regulatory rigor, these barriers to entry act as a competitive moat.

It allows RLUSD to pitch itself to local exchanges not just as a trading pair, but as a fully auditable asset that aligns with Ankara’s tightening oversight and operational mandates.

RLUSD gives Ripple a broader institutional wedge

The Turkish rollout is part of a broader effort to embed RLUSD across Ripple’s institutional financial products, creating an ecosystem that extends well beyond spot-market liquidity.

According to first-quarter 2026 data from digital asset research firm Messari, RLUSD closed the quarter with a $340.3 million market capitalization natively issued on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), representing a 45% quarter-over-quarter increase.

This growth is heavily tied to Ripple’s positioning of the stablecoin across its treasury management, prime brokerage, institutional custody, and payment rails.

Simultaneously, institutional demand for on-chain collateral is accelerating. Messari noted that the total market capitalization for real-world assets (RWAs) on the XRPL reached $2.25 billion by the end of Q1 2026, surging 124% from the previous quarter.

As traditional financial instruments like private credit and money market funds are tokenized, they require a reliable, dollar-pegged settlement asset to function properly on-chain.

This ecosystem expansion directly impacts the network’s underlying infrastructure. While Ripple aims to limit direct volatility exposure for its institutional stablecoin users, increased enterprise activity on the XRPL inherently drives utility for XRP, the network’s native asset.

By offering a compliant digital dollar, Ripple is providing the necessary fiat-pegged liquidity to power higher-level institutional decentralized finance operations without relying on unsustainable business development incentives or fragmented centralized exchange liquidity.

University partnership adds local infrastructure

To anchor its commercial expansion, Ripple is simultaneously building physical and academic infrastructure within the country.

Alongside the exchange integrations, Ripple announced that Istanbul Technical University (ITU) has joined its global University Blockchain Research Initiative. The partnership would be funded directly by RLUSD allocations.

The firm said the partnership will also establish an XRPL validator node on the ITU campus and finance graduate fellowships and advanced blockchain research.

While the academic partnership secures a local footprint beyond exchange listings, the core narrative remains commercial.

For Ripple, Turkey offers a critical test of whether a regulated dollar stablecoin can compete in a market where demand for digital dollars already exists, but regulators are drawing tighter boundaries around how that demand is met.

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Fundstrat’s Tom Lee thinks 2027 and 2028 could represent a one-in-a-lifetime time period for stock gains.

Lee says in a new interview with CNBC that stocks could witness challenges between now and December and encourages investors to remain “vigilant but generally bullish.”

He notes that three potential major initial public offerings and midterm election seasonality could impact stocks. Lee also says the market will likely attempt to “test” Kevin Warsh, the new chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

But the longtime equities bull notes that two big factors are fueling his optimistic outlook on stocks going into 2027.

[3:10] “One is, I think the US economic growth rate is actually starting to step up. In other words, we could grow at 4%. And for the mature, largest economy in the world to start to accelerate growth, that’s pretty astounding. 

The second is the US is one of the biggest exporters of the most important tool in the next 10-15 years, which is AI products. And that means we are essentially a net exporter of a high-value product.

And there’s so much capital I think misallocated today because so much of it is held in private alternatives, but it’s going to move into the public markets. So I do think that, plus the demographic tailwind of millennials and Gen Z adding to the workforce, but then also beginning to inherit generational wealth, I think that is going to set up for after 2026, perhaps over the next two years, some of the biggest gains in the stock market in our lifetime.” 

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Fundstrat technical strategist Mark Newton says the US stock market is poised to broaden beyond semiconductors and memory stocks, warning that tech has gotten “over its skis” after an 18% rally in eight weeks and is likely to consolidate through the summer.

Speaking in a recent interview, Newton identified financials, industrials, consumer discretionary, and healthcare as the sectors best positioned to play catch-up as technology cools. He noted that the XHS healthcare services ETF recently broke to new all-time highs, calling it an encouraging sign that broadening is underway.

“I am optimistic that we can start to broaden out. I do suspect that technology is going to need to consolidate at some point in June and or July. Difficult to see an 18% rally in 8 weeks just continue at the same pace. It’s highly unlikely, and we’re going to need to consolidate.”

Newton said the overall market is not overextended, but many investors have been cautious amid a leadership transition at the Federal Reserve and lingering geopolitical tensions. He noted that investors who lack sufficient exposure to high-weighted semiconductor and memory names have struggled to keep pace with the S&P 500.

Newton said he is not bearish and expects the consolidation in tech between July and October to create buying opportunities heading into the midterm elections.

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