美股去年很牛 谨防乐极生悲

Sam Stovall joins me from the trading floor of the Investment, chief investment strategist at S&P Equity Research. Sam, lovely to have you with us, tonight. And I didn't think frankly when we went into 2010, that the gains would be double digit. But this last few weeks has turned that around.

It certainly has, yes, heading into 2010, I thought it was going to be an up year, but because we've just gone through such a horrendous mega-meltdown or bear market in excess of 40%, I thought that investors would be very skittish about entering back into equities. But certainly what's happened is that we did have our more traditional midterm election year bottom that took place, but then since then, we've seen a tremendous run of more than 23% on the S&P 500. And I think investors are basically saying they like what they see in terms of economic projection.

You see, that's really interesting, my numbers didn't quite bring out the clarity of that from trough to peak of the year. You're talking about that 23%. OK, but you had to be very selective, didn't you? It wasn't like the quite good old days where the rising tide lifted all stocks?

Well, actually it was a very good year, because whether you look at large, mid or small cap stocks， and whether you look at any of the ten sectors in each one of those 3 benchmarks or even the 3, the 2 different styles: growth and value. All of those assets classes rose in 2010, albeit healthcare and utilities were up by low single digits, and we had consumer discretionary, energy stocks in the small cap space up close to 40%. But across the board, a lot of people are smiling. 

So, we had the DAX in Germany, which is the best of all the major markets on transatlantic, basically, up 17%, we got the FTSE up about 10, the S&P 12, 14 percent, 13 percent for the year. The core question I can hear the viewers are at home, saying, fine, Richard, that's what happened last year. Ask Sam Stovall what happens next.

Right, thanks for telling me what I just missed out on. What do I have to look forward to?

Well, I think we have to look forward to is a good year, but not a great year. History would say that it could be very good, because we are on the 3rd year of the president's term in office, and since World War II, the market has never declined, and the average price advance has been 17 percent, but we're also in what I call a half speed economic recovery, where instead of getting a 6% growth in the first year, we only got a 3% growth, and our expectation is for a sub 3 % GDP advance for all of 2011, so while history is sort of pushing us forward, I think that our economic growth projections might hold us back a bit.