Taking the contrarian position

When almost nobody expects the market to rally, the doctrine of contrary opinion suggests it might

Working my way through a pile of stock market forecasts the other day I was struck by an encouraging thou-ght. None of the seers whose writings I consulted was predicting a new bull market. Quite a few raised the opposite possibility: further declines in stock prices, which after a 16-month bear market are still widely viewed as too high by measures such as price/earnings (P/E) ratios. The Standard & Poor's 500 index P/E hovers around 30 to 1, right where it stood a year ago, though the index has fallen 16% since then. The bulls, if you could call them that, talked about a gradual and...