Global markets traded near all-time highs on Tuesday, with S&P futures, Asian shares and European stocks all flat this morning, while oil continued to gain on Kurdish geopolitical concerns while most industrial metals fell. The euro extended its recent slide and stocks drifted as Spain’s escalating hard-line response to the Catalonian secession threat fueled concern the crisis may intensify.
At the start of 2017, the most optimistic strategist forecast the S&P 500 at 2,500 by year-end.
S&P Year-End forecasts as of 1/6/17...
In the last few weeks, the market has not only surpassed that most-exuberant guess...
As Bloomberg notes, despite two strategists upgrading their targets on Friday, professional prognosticators are hardly raging bulls: At 2,524, their average estimate represents a 1% decline in the benchmark gauge.
Authord by Ben Levisohn via Barrons,
In the rise of computer-driven trading, some hear echoes of the stock market’s 1987 crash. Beware the feedback loop...
Black Monday. Although the event to which those two words refer occurred 30 years ago, they still carry the weight of that day—Oct. 19, 1987—when the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed nearly a quarter of its value in wave after wave of selling.
As U.S. equity markets casually melt up to all new highs with each passing day, Morgan Stanley Equity Strategist Michael Wilson, whose 2,550 year-end price target from back in August was just breached in a matter of months, says he's getting somewhat concerned given Fed tightening, tax cut legislation that looks increasingly unlikely to pass, USD strengthening and extreme levels in pretty much every economic indicator which will make future improvement nearly impossible.
Something unexpected happened on the market's relentless trek to all time highs: the market died.