Technical indicators such as equity price movement largely show stocks are poised to continue a rally that has seen the S&P 500 climb 8% year-to-date, analysts who track them said. TECHNICALLY SPEAKINGThe S&P 500 (.SPX) has traded in a 9.7 percentage point range year-to-date, its narrowest range for comparable periods since 2017. Johnson, who has a year-end S&P 500 target of 4,625, is encouraged by the reversals in downtrends for many U.S. stock indexes. The S&P 500 has traded higher 83% of the time for the full year, returning an average 13.73%, when it hasn't dropped below the preceding year’s December low in the first quarter, a Piper Sandler analysis showed. The S&P 500 is trading at about 18 times 12-month forward earnings estimates compared to its long-term average P/E of 15.6 times, according to Refinitiv Datastream.

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