By Jamie McGeever

ORLANDO, Florida, Feb 5 (Reuters) - "Bouncebackability."

This Britishism is normally related to cliche-prone soccer managers trumpeting their teams' ability to react to defeat. It's not likely to find its way throughout the pond into the Wall Street crowd's lexicon, but it completely sums up the U.S. stock market's strength to all the setbacks, shocks and everything else that's been thrown at it just recently.

And there have been a lot: U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff flip-flops, extended appraisals, extreme concentration in Big Tech and the DeepSeek-led turmoil that just recently cast doubt on America's "exceptionalism" in the international AI arms race.

Any one of those issues still has the potential to snowball, triggering an avalanche of selling that might push U.S. equities into a correction and even bear-market territory.

But Wall Street has actually ended up being extremely resistant given that the 2022 thrashing, particularly in the last 6 months.

Just look at the synthetic intelligence-fueled chaos on Jan. 27, stimulated by Chinese startup DeepSeek's revelation that it had developed a big language model that could attain similar or much better results than U.S.-developed LLMs at a fraction of the expense. By lots of steps, the marketplace relocation was seismic.

Nvidia shares fell 17%, slicing nearly $600 billion off the firm's market cap, the greatest one-day loss for any company ever. The value of the wider U.S. stock exchange fell by around $1 trillion.

Drilling much deeper, analysts at JPMorgan discovered that the thrashing in "long momentum" - basically purchasing stocks that have actually been performing well just recently, such as tech and AI shares - was a near "7 sigma" move, or 7 times the basic discrepancy. It was the third-largest fall in 40 years for this trading method.

But this legendary relocation didn't crash the market. Rotation into other sectors sped up, and around 70% of S&P 500-listed stocks ended the day greater, suggesting the wider index fell only 1.45%. And purchasers of tech stocks quickly returned.

U.S. equity funds drew in almost $24 billion of inflows recently, technology fund a 16-week high, and momentum funds drew in positive flows for a fifth-consecutive week, according to EPFR, the fund flows tracking company.

"Investors saw the DeepSeek-triggered selloff as a chance instead of an off-ramp," EPFR director of research Cameron Brandt composed on Monday. "Fund streams ... recommend that much of those investors kept faith with their previous assumptions about AI."

PANIC MODE?

Remember "yenmageddon," the yen bring trade volatility of last August? The yen's unexpected bounce from a 33-year low against the dollar triggered worries that investors would be required to sell assets in other markets and countries to cover losses in their big yen-funded carry trades.

The yen's rally was severe, on par with previous financial crises, and the Nikkei's 12% fall on Aug. 5 was the most significant one-day drop considering that October 1987 and the second-largest on record.

The panic, wiki-tb-service.com if it can be called that, spread. The S&P 500 lost 8% in two days. But it vanished rapidly. The S&P 500 recovered its losses within 2 weeks, and the Nikkei did likewise within a month.

So Wall Street has actually passed two huge tests in the last six months, a duration that included the U.S. governmental election and Trump's go back to the White House.

What explains the resilience? There's no one obvious answer. Investors are broadly bullish about Trump's economic program, the Fed still appears to be in easing mode (in the meantime), the AI frenzy and U.S. exceptionalism narratives are still in play, and liquidity abounds.

Perhaps one essential chauffeur is a well-worn one: the Fed put. Investors - a number of whom have actually spent a good chunk of their working lives in the period of extraordinarily loose financial policy - may still feel that, if it truly boils down to it, the Fed will have their backs.

There will be more pullbacks, and threats of a more prolonged slump do seem to be growing. But for now, the rebounds keep coming. That's bouncebackability.

(The viewpoints revealed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.)

(By Jamie McGeever