After spending much of 2022 playing defense, professional speculators are reasserting themselves with aggressive equity bets on both the short and long side.

Worried? Yes. But investors have evinced few signs of panic amid a stock market drubbing that has wiped out $3 trillion, going by everything from fund flows to options trading.

Professional stock pickers are beating the market in a scale not seen in more than a decade.

Equity skeptics obsessed with everything from inflation to pie-in-the-sky earnings estimates have managed to miss a $5 trillion rally being amplified by trends in investor positioning.

The extreme pessimism that’s gripped American stock investors for much of the year is starting to dissipate. That might be reason for caution.

The biggest stock-bond rally in more than two decades has just raised the ante for investors betting Jerome Powell will send somewhat dovish signals at Wednesday’s high-stakes policy decision.

As if another inflation shock and earnings drama at big banks weren’t enough for stock investors, Friday brings a critical moment where many option traders must decide their next move on hedging.

Week after week of on-the-fly calculations about the intensity of inflation and the likelihood of a recession are preventing markets from finding equilibrium.

To state the obvious, it has been a good time to be short the market. But the success of bearish traders in 2022 goes beyond luck.

Options insurance. Hedging with Treasuries. Using sentiment to pick a bottom. The things that have lessened the pain of past equity selloffs are coming up short this time around.

While hedge funds were busy bailing from stocks at a record pace as the S&P 500 plunged into a bear market, Corporate America was furiously buying.

Despite a lot of confident predictions, nobody knows what will happen at the Federal Reserve Wednesday, never mind what the impact will be on markets.

Bearish investors are snapping up bullish options to ensure that their defensively positioned portfolios won’t be left behind if the latest rebound in US stocks proves persistent.

First it was a rout in the stay-at-home names that surged in the pandemic. Then speculative software makers with barely any earnings went south. Now the giant technology names whose sway on benchmarks has been decried by bears for years are dragging the market down.

Call them brazen, call them naïve, but stock investors are giving no sign of being daunted by the hottest inflation in decades or the accompanying surge in bond yields. Their boldness has sent analysts in search of ways to explain how the S&P 500 Index has managed to rally in five of the last six sessions, even as the Federal Reserve promises higher rates while war rages in Europe and Treasury rates see the biggest two-day jump in two years.

With the S&P 500 extending its selloff from a recent record to more than 10%, trading is spiking across exchange-traded funds from leveraged strategies tracking technology shares to those betting on market volatility.

In the pandemic world, nobody relies too much on historic precedent. Things change too quickly. And yet one pattern that has endured is the equity market’s weird habit of rising whenever the calendar flips.

It was another tough week in a brutal year for bears. Despite being right about many aspects of inflation, monetary policy and the persistence of the coronavirus, equity bears who were expecting anything to put a meaningful brake on the stock market were again denied.

Laden with giant companies, the S&P 500 may end up being a haven from wage pressures that have begun to sow anxiety among investors, research shows.

From a global tremor in sovereign bonds to a spike in energy costs, October lived up to its reputation as one of the most volatile months for markets. To stock bears’ chagrin, though, the tumult did nothing to halt the relentless rally in equities.

The recent synchronized selloff in equities and Treasuries was likely just the beginning of what’s to come for the popular 60/40 stock-bond portfolio strategy, a growing chorus of Wall Street strategists warn.

Bulls betting that a revival of the reopening trade would keep the U.S. stock market afloat had to face a hard fact on Monday: The technology giants are hard to ignore.

An enduring mystery of 2021 markets showed signs of unwinding Thursday, with divergent signals on economic growth in stocks and bonds beginning to harmonize.

If you think a rush by companies to sell their shares is a bad omen for the market, imagine a scenario where most of the sales come from firms that don’t make money.

Buying shares trading at 40 times earnings may not sound like a good deal. But that’s exactly what Maneesh Deshpande is telling clients to do.

Market watchers have heard the warnings over and over. Stocks are expensive. Growth is set to slow. Higher taxes and hawkish monetary policy loom as threats. Yet there’s a mighty force pushing back against all the bearish voices: buyers who keep on buying.

It’s standard Wall Street procedure to make predictions about earnings for this year, or next year, or two years hence. But the profit prognosis for a half-decade from now -- would anyone dare look that far out?

Markets are vulnerable to “significant declines” should risk appetites falter, the Federal Reserve has warned. At the moment, there are very few signs of that happening.

The highest-flying tech names are getting no help from one of the sector’s usual lifelines amid a fierce selloff that’s showing few signs of slowing.

It came as a shock on Wall Street the last few days, how much better the world’s biggest companies were doing than anyone thought. Also unexpected was what the market made of those results. Despite big earnings beats, the share-price performance of the vaunted Faang cohort has been mediocre.

Everywhere you look, there’s a valuation lens that makes stocks look frothy. Also everywhere you look is someone saying don’t worry about it.

As harrowing as it has been to watch bond yields jump, watching them sit still would’ve been worse for stock investors banking on a major revival in earnings this year.

About $22 trillion of wealth was created in U.S. stocks, roughly the country’s total annual output. An exchange-traded fund tracking the airline industry has more than doubled. At least 45 companies in the S&P 500 have surged by more than 200%, including Tesla Inc., up almost 700%.

It may turn out that five new special purpose acquisition companies per day was too many.

Turmoil in mega-caps like Apple Inc. is stirring investor anxiety. But for professional stock pickers, it’s mostly good news when the market’s biggest companies loosen their grip.

For bond investors, inflation is pretty much all bad news, eating into the value of future returns. For equity traders, the tidings can be less categorically awful, given the ability of certain companies to wring profits from higher prices.

Hedge funds are slashing their stock exposure at the fastest rate in more than six years as a wave of volatility tied to some of their most-prominent bets forced a retreat from the market.

When someone identifies as a bear, normally it means they’re selling. In this market, where anyone who dares do that gets crushed, it just means you’re a little less bullish than everyone else.

After gutting buybacks to conserve cash, American corporations are repurchasing shares again. Corporate officers, on the other hand, are showing a bit less enthusiasm for their employers’ shares.

U.S. stocks will sink in coming months before resuming their record-setting rally and faster growth will spark inflation and higher yields in Treasuries, according to Byron Wien’s annual list of surprises.

To defend soaring equity markets against claims of overinflation, economists often cite a valuation methodology that adjusts stock prices for interest rates. The latest to do it is Jerome Powell.

An interesting thing keeps happening in the American stock market. Lately, when ownership of young companies passes from the institutions who nurtured them into the much broader arms of the investing public, their valuations double.

With Tesla Inc. about to be added to the S&P 500, people have wondered where index-tracking mutual funds will find the $80 billion of stock they’ll need to own in Elon Musk’s car-maker. Now they know: at least some of it will come from Elon Musk’s car-maker.

Some day, investors will be overwhelmed by all the fresh stock coursing into the U.S. equity market, and maybe even regret bidding up buzzy businesses that haven’t earned any money. But that day has not yet come.

The reopening rally, billed as a blessing for stock pickers, has failed to match hopes, at least as of yet. For many funds it made November another painful one when it came to competing with benchmarks.

A stock-market election indicator that is often ridiculed for its randomness but whose record of prescience is hard to ignore, at least completely, settled in Donald Trump’s favor on Tuesday.

It’s a fool’s errand trying to find an election signal in a stock market roiled by a global pandemic, but investors will take any edge they can get. One such indicator is flashing a warning for Donald Trump’s chances on Nov. 3.

Shares of renewable-energy companies expected to benefit from Biden’s energy policy plans have surged.

A group of investors who correctly timed the stock market’s bottom in March isn’t bargain hunting yet during the current selloff. Instead, they’re stepping up sales, flashing an ominous signal to any dip buyers.