The Nasdaq Composite entered Tuesday down nearly 4% over the past week, with the 10-year Treasury yield jumping to its highest level since 2023. A cooler-than-expected inflation report on Tuesday morning did not bring immediate relief to the tech trade, as the Nasdaq was lagging again in midday trading. However, some wealth managers are saying this could be a minor adjustment for the market rather than the start of a downturn. Ritholtz Wealth Management CEO Josh Brown has argued that the sell-off is an example of delayed tax-selling. In this manner, investors are deferring the realization of big gains in their tech stocks into early 2025, rather than incurring them at the tail end of last year. “There’s a massive wealth management-driven move happening here that is 100% related to private clients telling their advisor don’t you dare drop a tax bill on me in the last two weeks of this year. We’re taking our massive Nasdaq gains next year at the earliest,” Brown said Monday on ” Halftime Report .” .IXIC YTD mountain The Nasdaq Composite is off to a bumpy start in 2025. Andrew Smith, chief investment strategist of Delos Capital Advisors, said his clients have not been too focused about tax implications recently, but he is not too worried about this sell-off either. Smith said he has been selling bonds and buying into cyclical areas of the market, like small cap energy, to position for a higher-for-longer rate environment. “I don’t think it’s anything bad. I just think it’s more this is the new regime that we’re going to be in, and we’re in that because we didn’t kill the inflation dragon, and that’s OK,” Smith said. David Waddell, CEO of Waddell & Associates, is somewhere in the middle. He said that potential tax cuts have driven some of his recent moves for clients but thinks that the rising yields are also playing a role in the struggles for tech stocks. He pointed to strong performance on Monday of more value-centric areas of the market as a good sign that this sell-off wasn’t the start of something bigger. “The most important question to answer is ‘do you think we’re going to have a recession?’ And if the answer is ‘no,’ then we just move through this digestion period,” Waddell said.
