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Why S&P 500 still set for 10% gain: Fund manager

Expert sees 10% return on S&P this year
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Expert sees 10% return on S&P this year

The stock market low on April 11 has a "pretty good chance" of being the recent bottom, Ed Keon, portfolio manager at Prudential's Quantitative Management Associates, told CNBC on Monday. He added that the could rise 10 percent this year.

In the holiday-shortened week ended Thursday, gains of 2.4 percent in the Dow Jones industrial average and 2.7 percent in the S&P basically wiped out the sharp declines of the previous week, which had raised concerns about whether the downturn was the start of the long-feared correction.

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"We'll probably get a real correction at some point. But so far, it looks like we've survived another one," Keon said in a "Squawk Box" interview.

The S&P is now nearly 1 percent higher for the year, while the Dow is still off 1 percent.

"I think we're going to get around 10 percent return on the S&P this year. But we've got to have a little giddy up to get there," Keon predicted.

With nearly 10 percent of S&P 500 companies already out with quarterly results, the numbers are down 4.7 percent, with about 64 percent beating rather tepid expectations, according to Zacks Investment Research.

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Keon acknowledged "earnings are lower than they would have been because of the bad weather," but said he does see economic growth and earnings accelerating going forward.

Earnings season kicks into high gear this week with an additional 30 percent of S&P companies set to report.

As for the stock market overall, it's not cheap but at "about 15 times forward earnings ... that's not terribly expensive either," Keon said.

He argued: "After a great year last year, it's kind of better to have a measured pace where you get price increases that are roughly in-line with earnings growth."

—By CNBC's Matthew J. Belvedere.