Investment guru Jim Paulsen predicts that the seemingly endless record-smashing bull-run stock market will continue to charge deeper into record territory in the new year.
The Leuthold Group’s chief investment strategist told CNBC that the S&P 500 could surge another 15% next year.
However, he thinks savvy investors will fare best next year by looking abroad and turning their attention to international markets.
“This will be like the third time we’ve had re-acceleration in the global recovery just in this expansion alone. We had it in 2012 and 2013. We had it again in 2017 [and] 2018,” he told CNBC.
“Every time that’s happened, international stocks have beat U.S. stocks, and I think they will again,” he said. “The emerging markets will be the big winner of 2020,” said Paulsen. “They’re under-owned in most portfolios. They’re unloved because of their underperformance in recent years.”
For the U.S., he sees more record highs in the stock market.
“We have very low inflation,” he noted. “But more important, we have very stable inflation. We have the least volatile consumer price inflation rate over the last 30 years of any time in U.S. history,” he said.
He told CNBC that his favorite stock picks are small caps, technology, financials and some industrials.
“They [investors] have been piling into bonds and defensive stocks,” Paulsen said. “They’re going to have to come back to more of the cyclical areas of the stock market.”
Meanwhile, emerging markets are about to end a turbulent year in which U.S.-China trade tensions dominated headlines and central banks around the world came to rescue the global economy from falling into a recession.
Stocks, currencies and local-currency sovereign bonds of developing economies are all eking out gains for 2019 after last year’s biggest annual losses in three years, Bloomberg explained.
“It was one of those weird years where the economic situation was worse than expected from the beginning of this year,” said Michael Kushma, the chief investment officer for global fixed income in New York at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. “That makes investors worried that we have all the good news priced in and that next year it’s going to be much more challenging.”
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