Economists at Deutsche Bank share their S&P 500 Index forecast.

Equities should continue to grind higher

While the move up in positioning now looks complete, if earnings remain robust, so will buybacks, and equities should continue to grind higher. We continue to target S&P 4,500 by year-end.

With discretionary investors focused on a long list of concerns that are unlikely to be resolved soon, we expect the grind higher to be choppy.

At the regional level, we move from overweight to neutral on European equities as they posted one of their strongest outperformances on record, and expect limited relative upside in H2.