‘There is a new cloud of fear’ over Wall Street: Market analyst

  • Washington, D.C., may be calling the escalating trade tensions a negotiation, but Wall Street is saying the situation looks like a trade war, says analyst Michael Farr.
  • Stocks dropped Monday, with the Dow tumbling 350 points.
  • Technical strategist Katie Stockton believes what’s happening is a healthy pullback.

Washington, D.C., may be calling the escalating trade tensions a negotiation, but Wall Street is saying the situation looks like a trade war, analyst Michael Farr told CNBC on Monday.

In fact, there has been a shift in sentiment in the market since June 15, when President Donald Trump said the U.S. would slap a 25 percent tariff on up to $50 billion in Chinese goods, the president of investment management firm Farr, Miller & Washington said.

It wasn’t Trump’s first move to crack down on what he calls unfair trade practices. However, it also spurred on a tit-for-tat exchange between the U.S. and China.

“At what point do we turn into some sort of barroom brawl?” Farr, a CNBC contributor, said on “Power Lunch.”

“There is a new cloud of fear. Will it last? We haven’t seen any one of these downward sort of trends take over yet.”

Wall Street
Gary Hershorn | Getty Images

The latest news came Monday, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is preparing to restrict investment in U.S. technology by Chinese companies. Stocks tumbled, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping 358 points in midafternoon trading.

However, technical strategist Katie Stockton believes the pullback is a healthy one.

While in the short term stocks may continue to fall, she told “Power Lunch” that in the intermediate term prices should move higher.

“There’s nothing about this pullback that’s suggesting it’s something worse, something that should be much more prolonged,” said Stockton, founder and managing partner at Fairlead Strategies said. “In fact, today we have the first short-term oversold condition since early April for both the Dow industrials and the S&P 500.”