Sam Eisenstadt, who has a solid long-term track record of market calls, expects stocks to rise about 10% over the next six months but lose strength later in the year. Eisenstadt is the former research director at Value Line, Inc. When he retired in 2009, Value Line’s flagship publication was in first place for risk-adjusted performance over the three decades Hulbert Financial Digest had been tracking advisory performance, according to MarketWatch’s Mark Hulbert. Eisenstadt’s forecasting model takes a wide variety of variables into account, Hulbert says, and two reasons it’s optimistic right now are free reserve levels in the banking system and the market’s dividend yield. “Eisenstadt … told me that, based on the trend of some of the inputs to his model, he suspects that stock market strength will fade as the year continues,” Hulbert says. “He said he wouldn’t be surprised if ‘the early months of 2012 will be stronger than the later ones.’”