December 31, 2009, by James Dailey, Portfolio Manager
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
TEAM Financial Asset Management Outlook for 2010
After an uncharacteristic week off, we are happy to be back and share our outlook for 2010. We remain fairly concise in this forum, so clients can expect a more specific and expanded outlook (or sedative for their insomnia for some!) sometime in mid January.
In many respects, financial markets are not tremendously different from where they were in 2007, which is incredible given the amount of economic and market turmoil that has unfolded since then. Stocks are a little cheaper on average than they were in 2007, but have returned to levels that are likely to sentence most buy and hold stock investors to very poor returns over at least the next five to seven years– in our opinion of course.
The same could have been argued, and we did, for much of the 2004-2007 period and stocks did not seem to care! Our challenge for 2010 is to try and assess when what we believe to be very dangerous long term fundamentals begin to matter again. As 2009 ends and we turn over the calendar, we do not yet see imminent signs of a new cyclical downturn in risk assets like stocks and riskier bonds. This can change in relatively short order if conditions evolve in a certain way, but we have not observed significant evidence in this regard to date.
More>> |
 |
