Access to Alpha Podcast | Gene Peroni on Market Corrections, Sector Strength & What Comes Next

With markets reacting to the onset of the Iran war, we invited Gene Peroni of Peroni Portfolio Advisors to the Access to Alpha podcast series where he put today’s volatility in perspective and offered his thoughts on what may lie ahead.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Investors ought to focus on longer-term trends, as opposed to often short-lived, event-triggered corrections.
2. Since October 2025, many traditional cyclicals began leading while Technology corrected … until recently. 
3. Gene views the recent pullback as constructive (and arguably overdue) as it reined in price and sentiment excesses and positions the market to build support at incrementally higher levels. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Access to Alpha podcast series from Advisors Asset Management, where we provide exclusive market insights and timely commentary from our portfolio managers and strategic partners. AAM has been committed to delivering innovative, research-driven solutions that help investors navigate complex markets and build more resilient portfolios. We invite you to hear these insights now.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

This is Jim Proni with Proni Portfolio Advisors. I am pleased to join you on the AAM Access to Alpha podcast recorded on March 11th. Corrections are often event triggered, and the correction that we have witnessed here recently was surely one of those examples with the onset of the Iran war. When these events come along and when the market reacts adversely, I think it's important to take a longer view. That is to really assess the market, not with its current behavior, but in the context of its basic longer term trend. And there was an important change in this market that began to take shape last October. That is when we saw a number of sectors and themes that had been underperforming for years as technology really stole much of the leadership limelight came to life and exhibited good relative strength. Many of these areas were considered to be traditional cyclicals. Agriculture, aerospace, and defense, the industrials, the metals, and the materials, these and other categories really showed improving participation within the market. And in the subsequent months following October, they have really risen toward the top of the leadership rankings here. And I think that's important because this is a market that I believe is not contracting, but actually expanding. And around October, the technology group began to correct. And that correction continued until just recently. We do see from time to time that leadership categories do go through these consolidations. And I think that's constructive for the long term. It reins in some of the price incentive excesses and builds support at incrementally higher levels. So as things stand now in the market, uh it is my opinion that the recent pullback has been constructive. And we might even argue that this correction was somewhat uh overdue. We haven't had a significant pullback in this market since uh last April. So this also I think is uh a positive factor that we did get a correction and we have gotten what I consider to be a relatively normal uh consolidation that is uh reined in some of the recent uh big moves in some of those emerging uh sectors and themes that I just mentioned. But also at the same time, we've seen technology uh bottoming here in recent uh weeks. So this I think is a market that is in an expanding trend, not a contracting one, and the pullback uh I would view as uh constructive. Recently, the CBOE volatility index reached the 35 level, which I believe reflected mild panic in the market. It has since pulled back into the mid-20s, but remains in an uptrend that began back in December of last year. So volatility is still on the table, but I think to a lesser degree. I think in the coming weeks here we will uh see the market begin to rebound, and I think that this rebound will be sustainable over a longer period of time.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Thank you for joining us on this edition of AAM's Access to Alpha. For more information, please reach out to a financial professional or visit our website at AAMLive.com.