As the market closed out its last day of trading in July, one strategist shared a dose of optimism with investors—he thinks the will rally about 10 percent by the end of the year to 2,311.
John Stoltzfus, chief market strategist at Oppenheimer, told CNBC's "Power Lunch" on Friday that an improvement in earnings will power the move.
"We're getting a lot of the bad stuff out over the summer and when we come into the second half of the year, we'll see improvement in earnings, economic data will persist, giving us evidence that the economy's growth is sustainable," he noted.
Oppenheimer has an "outperform" rating on information technology, financial, consumer discretionary, industrials and materials.
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Eric Ervin, CEO of Reality Shares, on the other hand, has a more bearish outlook on the market.
"We look at the different realities of the stock market and that's all about behavior and right now the behavior of the stock market is trending negative," he told "Power Lunch."
"It's not that the price of the stock market is trending negative, it's that as the sectors start to perform negatively, they continue to perform more negatively. So velocity on the downside is increasing and that's probably going to drive some nervous nellie investors off to the sidelines."
Right now, two sectors are negative—energy and utilities, said Ervin, adding that health care is getting close, mostly due to volatility.
"We've already had two sectors break down and indicate a bear market territory. One more sector and then that would signal to us it's time to be out of the market entirely," he said.
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—CNBC's Brenda Hentschel contributed to this report.