The Results Are In!

Each year I take a sampling of portfolio managers and ask them for their forecasts for the year ahead. The 2 questions they are asked are where will the S&P 500 (SPX) finish in the year ahead? And where will the yield on the 10-year T-note finish?

Congratulations to Cody Willard, my friend and colleague at TheStreet.com for his winning prediction. Cody estimated the SPX would end the year at 1420 (it finished at 1418), for a bullish +14% return.

To put that in perspective, the average of all the investment managers surveyed was a forecast for a modest +2.4% return. So at the time, Cody was going out on a bit of a limb. Although there were a few more bullish forecasts that his, there were far more that were less bullish.

And I would also like to give a shout out to Sean Mueller of MCM in Denver for his bond prediction. Sean said the 10-year yield would finish at 4.7%, which is exactly where it finished!

Now that he is completely snowed in, he can focus all his attention on fine tuning those algorithms to come up with another fabulous forecast.

Congrats to our winners. As usual, the winning prize is dinner on me. All you have to do is come to LA to collect. And to those of you who said that the SPX would finish with a 10-handle on it, better luck this year.

I am now compiling forecasts for 2007. If you are a portfolio manager, please send me your predictions. Good luck!