A fresh high for the S&P 500 might be winning over some doubters, but Wall Street veteran Milton Berg needs no convincing.
"There's no reason at all to doubt this rally," the CEO of Milton Berg Advisors told MarketWatch in an interview this week. "This is a buying opportunity, and it's late now, because now we're at new highs, but the pullback is a buying opportunity and the breakouts to new highs are also a buying opportunity,"
Berg's nearly 50-year old Wall Street career includes advising big-name investors Stanley Druckenmiller and George Soros and earning co-mutual fund manager of the year in 1987 for navigating the market crash. He made a contrarian bull market call in January 2023 and nailed the stock bottom in April 2025.
He argues the current bull market is intact mainly because there is fundamentally no recession, while the Fed isn't tightening and inflation is "always good for markets where the Fed isn't fighting it." Finally, the market action itself speaks volumes.
Of the recent "serious" correction, he says those are normal. "It's crazy to think this serious correction is the start of a new bear market. Usually you don't get a second bear market from one year over a major bottom."
Berg leans on historical data over "meaningless" opinions about the war or oil prices, and watches 30,000 individual indicators to get 2,000 action-based models, looking for market trends.
He's been advising institutional investors since 2012, and in January started a $10-a-month service for retail investors that keeps things simple. Those investors are either told to go long on the S&P 500 via ETFs such as State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY and Vanguard S&P 500 ETF VOO or move to cash. He notes that over seventy-five years or so, buy signals have tended to last 1.25 years.
His April 2025 bottom call was the product of 80 buy signals that told him the S&P 500 would reach 7,437 and 7,399 within a year. That the target hasn't been met isn't that important.
"The key isn't our projection, the key is our direction. Once investors get long in April of last year, it really doesn't matter if we're up to 6,500 or 7,900, as long as you're long for that move, they made money."
He's got fewer buy signals for the current rally, but those signals are predicting the S&P will reach a minimum 7,639.69 within a year, and a median 8,499, roughly 19% above Wednesday's close.
The signal for retail to buy came April 10, stemming from a rare pattern, in which the Nasdaq-100 QQQ rose eight straight days, from March 31 to April 10, after a decline of more than 12%. Berg notes only three such instances in the past, with corresponding gains of 35.10%, 33.6% and 9.55% before the next pullback, he said.
"The bears are telling you that this is only the top, but we have so many indicators that turned bullish," he said. "We're going with what the market is telling us rather than what the economists are telling us."
He flags another interesting indicator that popped up April 15, when the S&P 500 made a new all-time high, but only 15 stocks also hit 52-week highs. Looking at history, they saw the same setup on Feb. 10, 1995 - the index was exiting a correction, and went up another 40% without a pullback.
Berg said that was significant because it showed that 485 stocks were unable to drag down the index.
Another recent feat? "Never in history has the S&P 500 ever made a one-year high, on the 12th day past a 9% correction. So this rally off the latest low, is historic."
Berg also flags some stocks he's picked up recently - Woodward $(WWD)$, TTM Technologies $(TTMI)$, Seagate Technology $(STX)$, Celestica $(CLS)$, Lam Research $(LRCX)$ and Fabrinet.
"We diversify and we buy stocks based on earnings streams and on a combination of earnings and pattern analysis," said Berg. They aren't hunting for cheap stocks, but those "that are already acting well."
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