The bulls took charge of Wall Street in the first half of the year, with the Dow Jones industrial average producing a 15 percent gain, but only time will tell how the stock market fares in the next six months. If the past few days are any indication, though, the outlook is good.
Stocks rose for the fourth session in a row on Tuesday, with the benchmark S&P 500 index about 1 percent below its all-time closing high of 1,669.16 reached in late May.
Appearing on CNBC's "Closing Bell," a panel of investment professionals on Tuesday revealed their best investment ideas for the second half of the year.
Burt White, chief investment officer of LPL Financial, plans to stay defensive.
"You want to stay domestic and you want to stay consumer focused," White said. "So we think health care and consumer discretionary and those buybacks."
Adviser Investments CIO Jim Lowell agreed with White about investing in health care, revealing the sector accounts for his firm's biggest overweight position.
"Clearly [it's] an area where you're going to get, I hope, better returns on the market with significantly less risk," Lowell said, adding he likes the Vanguard Health Care exchange-traded fund, Hartford Healthcare HLS IA and Fidelity Select Health Care.
To Anastasia Amoroso, vice president and a global market strategist at JPMorgan Funds, though, health care seems to be getting a little expensive. Instead, she prefers late-cycle, consumer-geared stocks over health care or the globally oriented manufacturing story.
"I think domestically fueled cyclical sectors is [what] we still like, whether it's financials or consumer discretionary," Amoroso said. "If you look at where earnings growth is going to come from, those are the two sectors that have high correlation with rising rates."
—By CNBC's Drew Sandholm. Follow him on Twitter @DrewSandholm.
—Reuters contributed to this report.
