BlackRock Vice Chairman Bob Doll tells CNBC that, while the economy isn’t good, “some [analysts] have gone too far to the negative side,” and says that those analysts who have estimated $40 in per-share S&P 500 earnings for 2009 “are going to have to raise their numbers.” “Two months ago, it looked like a black hole,” Doll said. “Now, we have a much more balanced picture.”
Several weeks back we highlighted a new study that found stocks are actually more risky in the long run than they are in the short run. Today in an interview posted on the University of Pennsylvania’s Knowledge@Wharton web site, two Wharton School professors — Robert Stambaugh, one of that study’s co-authors, and Jeremy Siegel — talk about many of the issues the study raises for stock investors, as well as the current market conditions. Among… Read More
Yes, the news this morning is filled with swine flu and a bigger-than-expected first-quarter GDP drop, but Ed Yardeni of Yardeni Research — who has a pretty good track record of economic forecasting, including his solid calls on the last recession recovery in 2003 — is offering several reasons for economic optimism. (A tip of the cap to The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel for highlighting this.) In an email to clients, Yardeni cited a… Read More
If you’re worried about stocks taking a period of many, many years to recover following the recent market plunge, Mark Hulbert offers some insightful — and encouraging — news in The New York Times. While many have cited the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average took 25 years to get back to its pre-Great-Depression highs as reason to worry that the coming market recovery could take a upwards of 10 or even 20 years,… Read More
Researcher and money manager Rob Arnott has made a lot of headlines lately with his focus on the bond market, but in yesterday’s Financial Times he keyed in on another asset class — and it’s one that he says is extremely cheap right now: deep value stocks. “Most investors,” writes Arnott, “do not yet realise that today’s spread between growth and value, on most measures, is nearly as wide as it was at the peak… Read More
How did so many investors and analysts fail to recognize the looming economic and stock market crises in recent years? In their latest Forbes column, Whitney Tilson and John Heins say that “recency bias” is a big reason — and a major challenge facing all investors. “One of the more insidious investor biases is a natural tendency to assume that the future will look like the recent past,” write Tilson and Heins in explaining recency… Read More
Barron’s has unveiled its annual “Top 100 Financial Advisors” feature, with the new #1 being Gregory Vaughan of Morgan Stanley in Menlo Park, California — and the theme of the article being how these advisors are rethinking their approaches given the recent market meltdown. The top advisors “are giving diversification a thorough rethinking,” Barron’s Suzanne McGee writes. “It’s not as simple as owning a bunch of different investments. For example, there’s ‘tactical diversification,’ or moving… Read More
The big question in the market these days is, of course, whether the current rally is really the start of a new bull run, or if it is another bear market head fake. And two interesting, differing takes on the topic come from top strategists Barton Biggs and John Mauldin. In a recent CNBC interview, hedge fund star Biggs says the rally could well be for real. As of mid-April, he saw 40 signs that… Read More
In a piece written for Forbes’ Intelligent Investing section, David Serchuk today offers some interesting data on risk and portfolio management. One point made by several of those Serchuk interviewed is that asset allocation is a crucial, and often overlooked, key to managing risk. “The macro-picture here is that asset allocation remains an easy way to get to the core of your portfolio’s risk exposure, even though it gets relatively little attention in the financial… Read More
Sam Stovall, Standard & Poor’s chief investment strategist, offered some interesting data on whether this rally is for real in an interview with CNBC today. Stovall — who said back in March that the S&P 500 could rally 22 percent over the short term based on historical trends — says the market is due for a retest. “If history repeats itself, we would probably go through a retest,” he said. “We’re just at the beginning… Read More