2. Ring 10 Bells for The 10-year

In October, Steven Major, HSBC's head of fixed-income research, took a hatchet to his end-2016 U.S. Treasury yield forecast, making the team's call for the 10-year the lowest on the Street, at 1.5 percent.

Major said that a soft global-growth environment, a Fed tightening cycle that will prove more gradual than the dot plot, and spillovers from accommodative policy deployed abroad should put a cap on longer-dated U.S. yields.

“Our lower yield views are part of an international story, one that sees the ECB stuck in dovish mode well beyond the end-2016 forecast horizon and headwinds from some emerging markets," he wrote.

Conversely, economists at CIBC World Markets, RBC Capital Markets, Raymond James, High Frequency Economics, and Amherst Pierpont are among a group that expects the 10-year Treasury to be yielding more than 3 percent at yearend 2016.

The median forecast among analysts surveyed by Bloomberg is for the 10-year yield to rise to 2.75 percent by the end of 2016.

3. Underweight Health Care

Health care’s rough patch in 2015 centered around certain key figures (namely, Martin Shkreli, Michael Pearson, and Hillary Clinton). But for Ian Scott, Barclays head of equity strategy, the reasons to underweight the sector in 2016 are more top-down in nature.

“Rising bond yields, inflation expectations and decent economic growth should see the hefty safety premium investors are paying for these sectors [health care and consumer staples] reduce,” he wrote in a report dated Nov. 19.

Based on historical correlations with the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield, the strategist found that health care tends to underperform when yields are moving higher.

For a global equity portfolio, Scott recommends exposure of just 3.1 percent to health care vs. the benchmark weighting of 12.2 percent.

In the U.S. in particular, Scott's peers are much more bullish on the outlook for health care. Equity strategists at UBS are overweight in the sector, citing its “earnings momentum, strong top-line growth, attractive dividend yield and potential for further share buybacks” in a report dated Nov. 10.

David Bianco, Deutsche Bank's chief U.S. equity strategist, concurs with that call.

“We expect 6-per-cent sales growth from health care in 2016, well above nominal GDP and S&P 500 sales growth,” he wrote. “We expect 6 to 9 per cent EPS growth. We doubt the S&P delivers better growth.”