Here’s the silver lining to a flat year: Expert

While the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones industrial average are on pace to finish relatively flat for the year, investors should take away this silver lining, Paul Hickey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group, said Monday.

“What is good to be said about this year, is the market has done nothing. You’ve allowed for some consolidation,” Hickey told CNBC’s “Power Lunch.”

He also said flatness in the market one year is a good sign moving forward. “These dull years have typically been followed by some nice gains later on.”

S&P 500 this year

U.S. equities have had to contend with a number of factors, including falling oil prices, a rising dollar and the Federal Reserve raising rates for the first time in nearly a decade.

The central bank’s rate hike — announced Wednesday — was initially received positively by the markets, with all three major indexes closing sharply higher that day.

However, the excitement quickly dissipated, with stocks posting sharp losses Thursday and Friday.

Still, John Buckingham, chief investment officer at AFAM Capital, said the “the Fed is extremely accommodative.”

“If you look at what’s happened in the bond market since the Fed raised rates, bond yields have gone down. Obviously stock prices have gone down, which boost dividend yield payouts as well. I don’t think investors are worried that the Fed is somehow going to jack interest rates up dramatically. If anything, the Fed is super-duper accommodative,” he said in another “Power Lunch” interview.

Also, Drew Kanaly, chairman and president of Kanaly Trust, said Monday that U.S. stocks could manage slight gains for 2015.

“I think we’re past the tax-loss selling, so I think we can move past breakeven as the managers rebalance their portfolios, having taken all their losses. Now that the Fed decision is behind us, and everybody can kind of digest that, portfolios are going to get readjusted and we might see some nice positive returns between now and year-end,” he said, also on “Power Lunch.”

Correction: Drew Kanaly mentioned tax-loss selling in his comments. An earlier version misstated the type of selling.
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