Todd Gordon, CNBC contributor and founder of New Age Wealth Advisors, joined Benzinga's PreMarket Prep show on Friday morning.
Gordon discussed the S&P 500 market weakness so far in 2022 and how he is positioning his clients' money heading into the second half of the year.
Bullish Or Bearish Outlook: Gordon said just because he's managing people's money doesn't mean he always needs to be bullish on the stock market.
"I'm defensive. We've got a good amount of cash, but there is a component, we live and breathe in the short to medium-term, but I'm still longer-term bullish," Gordon said.
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He urged traders to not get bogged down in the massive amount of real-time information and fast-paced news headlines and lose sight of the longer-term picture.
Gordon said it's much easier to sell into market strength than it is to determine when to identify a re-entry into a long-term position.
"That's just a tricky game even for pros to play, but when at-home gamers who are successful in other areas of life and industry are trying to do that and they make a mistake, that mistake compounds into their retirement," he said.
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How To Play It: Gordon said the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE:SPY) will certainly recover all its 2022 losses eventually, but predicting whether that recovery will happen in six months or five years is difficult at best.
For investors with five-to-10-year investment horizons, Gordon said he loves the longer-term outlooks for semiconductor leaders NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD), and Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC). He is also bullish on Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL).
"How do you not like Apple? The balance sheet is amazing — the cash they have," he said.
He also said he may be a buyer of Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META), which has had a brutal 2022 up to this point.
"It's now a value stock, but can they pull off the hardware play? I'm not quite sure," he said. He's also long other megacap tech stocks, including Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA).
Growth Vs. Value: Energy and materials stocks have been top performers so far this year, but Gordon said the value stock trade has started to weaken in recent weeks.
Gordon also mentioned Enphase Energy Inc (NASDAQ:ENPH) and Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:LYV) as two of his preferred growth stock investments.
"I think we're just getting a little too far out in front of our skis with inflation. We're at 42-year highs, a scary headline. So the Fed goes to 3% or 3.25%, which they're saying is going to happen. The last time 'they' told us something that's going to happen six to 12 months from now, it never works out," Gordon said.
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