10 Top Rated Blue Chip Stocks Wall Street Analysts Are In Love With: January 2024

Ramish Cheema
8 min read

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In this piece, we will take a look at the ten top rated blue chip stocks Wall Street analysts are in love with in January 2024. If you want to skip our latest stock market coverage and want to take a look at the top five stocks in this list, then you can read 5 Top Rated Blue Chip Stocks Wall Street Analysts Are In Love With: January 2024.

With 2024 officially in full flow, the stock markets are performing well. The NASDAQ 100 index is trading at all-time high level, and the S&P 500 joined it on January 19th when it touched 4,804 and crossed its previous all-time high reading of 4,796 recorded two years ago.

The market as a whole appears to be entering 2024 with cautious optimism. Throughout 2023, investors battled with the Federal Reserve and economic data to time their bets and decipher Mr. Market's moves. Now, investors are trying to figure out whether the Federal Reserve's optimism through its interest rate hiking cycle in 2023 will prove warranted. The economy is performing well, in an interesting conundrum. While economic growth is always welcomed by the market, this time around, it accompanies concerns that perhaps a robust economy will also mean that the Fed feels comfortable keeping interest rates higher for longer.

Throughout the interest rate hiking cycle, and especially last year, the Fed has maintained that a soft landing for the U.S. economy might be on the horizon. What this means is that while interest rate increases will slow down growth, there won't be a recession.  Should this be the case, then the pain for consumers in the form of job losses can be mitigated.

Yet, even if the economy doesn't tip into recession, the system is already under stress from high interest rates. The start of the year has marked earnings reports from banks, and the consensus on that front is that while interest income is at all time high levels, bank deposit costs are also growing much faster than belt tightening managers would like. Some of the offending banks on this list are M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB), Discover Financial Services (NYSE:DFS), and KeyCorp (NYSE:KEY). Discovery, known for its digital banking services that provide branch less banking and loans, saw its net income plummet to $388 million during the fourth quarter from a sizeable year ago figure of $1 billion. At the core of this massive drop was an uncertain lending environment due to high rates. This forced Discovery to allocate more funds to risky loans in its portfolio, which ended up affecting the income statement. M&T and KeyCorp bother suffered from higher deposit costs. These led M&T to report a 6% drop in its net interest income, with KeyCorp's NII plummeting by a sizeable 24%.

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