Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch. Our afternoon update on today's market action news and analysis.

Good afternoon. Today is Monday, April 29th,'m your host Kim Khan. Our top story so far.

Is this the perfect environment for picking stocks?

While it may seem like Central Banks, geopolitics, and other macro factors are driving market performance,

Morgan Stanley says price action tells a different story.

For all the sound and fury coming from the macro,

2024 remains an unusually micro market,

strategist Andrew Sheets says,

and the dispersion seen in single stocks

is ideal for stock picking.

Morgan Stanley's prime brokerage strategic content group

said the first quarter of 2024 was the best first quarter for Equity Long Short

Alpha since 2010 when the data begins.

Even more notable, the Alpha is coming from both longs and shorts across US, Europe, and Asia.

Sheets added, stocks and credit are moving more with the macro on a day-to-day basis,

but 2024 is clearly showing that other forces are at work.

The average correlation between individual stocks is historically low.

That's the opposite of a high correlation world you'd expect

if macro factors were in the driver's seat. Under the surface, this is a market that is a micro machine.

The dispersion has practical implications. For active investors, an ideal stock picking environment is one with enough dispersion to create opportunity,

but not so much volatility that it's difficult to take risk.

This seems like a fitting description of the current backdrop, he argued.

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