After a year of rampant global economic and political change and volatility, one might hesitate to make predictions about anything, especially the behavior of aberrant stock markets. As Robert Doll, chief investment strategist at Nuveen Asset Management points out, few would have predicted the Brexit vote, the Italian referendum or the election of Donald Trump.
Even more surprising would be 2016 stock market behavior. The Dow Jones index had plunged 10 percent by mid-February of last year, only to score a double digit positive return by Christmas. Those roller coaster reverses didn’t just happen in the market, but within sectors. Consider that the performance of utilities stocks had trumped those of financials by some 2,900 basis points in the first half of 2016, but in the second half, financials beat utilities by 3,300 and won out for the year.
“One of the postscripts of 2016 is worth pointing out, and maybe I’m too much of a portfolio manager geek, but I think the swings in sectoral performance were unprecedented in 2016,” said Doll in a Manhattan press conference on Thursday morning. “I cannot remember a year in my career where the swings were as big as you see.”
“This is the dream of a portfolio manager,” he added.
Doll and Nuveen’s top 10 predictions for 2017, thus, imagine a world made for stock pickers, where correlations have become untethered, small-cap stocks trump large caps in a lower tax environment and value beats growth. He also thinks that the monetary easing game is largely over, and fiscal stimulus will be the new watchwords.
His take on the nascent Donald Trump administration is that that the frisson of excitement it has generated among investors will continue for a while but fade around midyear as they confront the reality of the legislative process. Thus it’s likely, said Doll, that the market’s best performance will come in the first half of the year.
Here are Doll’s and Nuveen’s top 10 predictions for 2017:
1. U.S. and global economic growth will improve modestly as the dollar strengthens and reaches parity with the euro.
2. Unemployment will fall to its lowest level in 17 years as wages increase at the fastest pace since the Great Recession.
3. Treasury yields will move higher for a third consecutive year for the first time in 36 years as the Fed raises rates at least twice.