The Clarion Call On The Market

On Tuesday The Royal Bank of Scotland’s credit chief, Andrew Roberts, made the clarion call to ‘sell everything.’ He predicts a cataclysmic year faces investors in 2016. A day earlier, a J.P Morgan equity strategist advised investors to sell any rally.

Investors are grappling with an increase in market volatility at the start of the New Year. After celebrating the end of a flat to mostly negative year in 2015, investors least expected the pace of the current January market pullback. As I discussed in this past weekend’s post, A Difficult Beginning For The Market To Start The New Year, market swings of greater than 10% have been scarce since 2011. Essentially, the market steadily climbed higher for nearly four years until last August when the S&P 500 Index declined 12.4% from the May high. In other words, investors may have been conditioned to expect lower volatility from stock prices.

Earlier today, Alan Steel, Chairman of Alan Steel Asset Management, a Scotland-based investment firm, wrote the below succinct commentary about the current market environment and the accuracy of strategists’ doomsday market predictions: