2011: The year of the equity

The New Year brings the inevitable predictions about the state of the economies and the future direction of stock market indices, which have taken on the genre of financial horoscopes.

The reality is few people correctly guess the finishing level of an index, or predict which asset class will be the best performing 12 months ahead. If the IMA sectors are used as a predictor, who would have said US Smaller Companies would have been the best performing sector in 2010, while those who thought it would be emerging markets had a good run for their money. There really is little value in making similar kind of predictions for 2011, but what the exercise does is provide confidence to investors. So when Charles Robertson, global chief economist at Renaissance Capital, makes ...