a**i 发帖数: 608 | 1 Published: Wednesday, 4 Jan 2012 | 3:57 PM ET Text Size By: Jeff Cox
CNBC.com Senior Writer
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After a year in which the Standard & Poor’s 500 finished almost exactly
flat for the year and with a slew of headwinds lurking, stock market
strategists could be excused for sounding a bit pessimistic for the year
ahead.
No worries, though: Wall Street is just as optimistic as ever that it can
somehow fight its way out of its year-long (indeed, decade-long) doldrums
and pull off a big gain in the next 12 months.
A pair of press briefings Wednesday showed vividly that market pros continue
to favor the sunny side of the Street.
Take, for instance, Binky Chadha, chief U.S. equity strategist at Deutsche
Bank.
Chadha is fresh off making what TheStreet.com recently dubbed the “biggest
S&P 500 blown call of 2011”—an audacious and stunningly wrong prediction
last year that the index would finish the year at an eye-popping 1550.
So he missed by nearly 25 percent? So what?
There was Chadha, telling reporters that the S&P 500 would finish this year
at a somewhat subdued 1500—about 18 percent from the current trading level
and nearing bull market territory.
Trust him, he has his reasons.
“The theme basically is equities are very cheap. We would argue that there
is also a lot of risk,” Chadha said. “The question is, how do you play the
value versus the risk?”
The answer, he suggested, was easy: Buy, buy, buy, despite what all the
naysayers profess. He broke his beliefs down into seven themes:
1) Worried about the future? Don’t be sucked in by the “extreme negativity
” which is at levels seen only three times in history.
2) M&A is on the way (we’ll give him this one).
3) Dividends are rising, so why not buy?
4) Stock buybacks are rising (hmmm…not really…they actually fell by $218
million in December).
5) the U.S. is not (bank on it) going into recession.
6) Europe isn’t really as bad as it looks.
7) the U.S. presidential election will be good for stocks since the
Republicans likely will take full control of Congress and, after all, it
doesn’t really matter to Wall Street who is president.
Chadha’s predictions were backed up in full throat by Deutsche’s chief
economist, Joe LaVorgna, who sees U.S. gross domestic product gaining 4.3
percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 and unemployment falling below 8
percent in 2012.
“The consumer’s got more sustainability than people believe,” LaVorgna
said.
Uptown a ways, strategists at Prudential Financial gathered to deliver a
bullish but decidedly more subdued forecast.
Ed Keon, Prudential’s quantitative management managing director, said the
market should chart some gains, though in “an unusually perilous time.”
John Praveeen, chief investment strategist, predicted global stocks to “eke
out” some gains, while chief market strategist Quincy Krosby sees a year
of “risky business” where investors had better hedge heavily in a market
where “you cannot afford to be in and you cannot afford to be out.”
So after a year when virtually every equity strategist overshot the market,
some by a wide margin, who should investors believe?
Judging by recent behavior, they are more inclined to act on their own.
In December, bond and bond fund allocations hit their highest levels since
November 2010, according to the American Association of Individual Investors
. Investors yanked $131.8 billion from stock mutual funds in 2011, said Nick
Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx.
Sam Stovall, chief equity strategist at S&P, advised clients this week to
buy simply because the flat preceding year indicates that the market has
nowhere to go but up. That’s a strategy that has served investors poorly,
particularly over the past decade, but it’s a popular market meme these
days.
Yet average investors remain unconvinced. Portfolio allocations average just
56.1 percent for stocks, below the historical norm of 60 percent, and the
level of AAII bullishness is just a net 10 percentage points higher than the
bears.
Still, the Wall Street chant of better days ahead for stocks remains.
In a word, it’s all about hope.
“During the first quarter of this year, it will likely become obvious
whether fallout from Europe will end the U.S. and global economic recoveries
or whether recent evidence of U.S. economic acceleration is for real,” Jim
Pauslen, chief market strategist at Wells Capital Management, said in a
note to clients. “And, if the U.S. economy continues to persevere, rising
confidence in the economy and in the financial markets should increasingly
prove a dominant theme for the year.” | s*****y 发帖数: 493 | 2 最后一星期底价贱卖了好大一笔,为了节税啊!
现在是新的一年了,终于可以放开手脚了。最基本的道理吧。 |
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