S&P

One week ago we were surprised to read that, in Tom Lee's 2017 market outlook, Wall Street's formerly most vocal cheerleader and its most prominent permabull had unexpectedly turned into one of the most skeptical bears. As a reminder, at a time when virtually every other Wall Street strategist, even the quasi skeptics, are convinced the market is going nowhere but higher, Lee now expects that the S&P 500 will finish the year virtually unchanged at 2,275, and roughly 3% lower than the median sellside forecast.

"I was promised Dow 20k, where's my Dow 20k?!!"

It's been a month since Bob Pisani said that Dow 20k was "inevitable"...

Gold leads in 2017 and bonds are beating stocks as crude lags...

In late December, we explained why of all Trump economic proposals , the "border tax adjustment", while most controversial, could have the biggest impact on US assets.

We have frequently written about the underwhelming performance of hedge funds over the last several years and continue to be perplexed by the seemingly misinformed decisions of the largest pensions and endowments to pay ridiculous fees for consistently lackluster performance (for example, see "Why Hedge Funds Remain The Worst Performing Asset Class Of 2016").  As Bloomberg recently noted, long-short funds tracked by Credit Suisse returned negative 4.3% in 2016 compared to a positive 9.5% return for the S&P, the worst relative performance for hedgies since 2011.

In the latest indication of the troubles facing the active management industry, iconic asset manager Jeremy Grantham, and his Boston money management firm, Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, have seen an unprecedented slump in assets under management as a result of failing to generate return on par with the market, leading to mass investor defections.