Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch.

I'm your host Kim Kahn, and today my guest, Steve Kress, the head of Quant Strategy at Seeking Alpha.

If you're looking for a comprehensive look at what's going on in the markets each day,

we have our Wall Street Breakfast Podcast, out before 7 a.m. Eastern time and our

follow-up Wall Street lunch up at noon. You can find them at Seeking Alpha or wherever

you get your podcasts. Steve, thanks a lot for joining us today. Thank you so much

for having me. It's a pleasure to be on your podcast so we want to look at the

broader market first or at least the market performance what we're seeing in the

second half of the years so far we're a month and a half into it versus what we saw in the first half.

The numbers we had a huge run-up in certain sectors and tech stocks in the first

half of the year and a very strong 16% gain in the S&P 500 for the first half and an even stronger

jump of nearly 40% in the NASDAQ 100 in the first half of the year. Now we seem to have stalled a little bit.

I just checking the numbers today, going in today's trading

on Thursday the 16th, and we're flat on the S&P.

And, you know, triple cues, we're down about the S&P and you know triple cues we're down about 1%. So Steve what are you seeing

is the differences of what you saw first half and versus second half so far from what we've got?

Yeah I think the first half was a real surprise for a lot of people.

You know, I distinctly remember back last November and December,

so many of the talking heads thinking that this was going to be another poor year and you know

lo and behold the market has just a major rally in the first half and I think that rally really

is we saw it in the mega tech stocks really you know the market was about five stocks in the first half of the year

You know that led to the S&P 500 being up about 16% and I think that

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