These 250 Investors Are The Most Bearish Since The Crisis

Everyone’s bullish and bearish at the same time these days.

This cognitive dissonance (a less charitable interpretation would be to just label it schizophrenia) is reflected in fund manager surveys which increasingly show investors are bullish on the very same assets they cite as being grossly overvalued.

In the same vein, “bubbles” continually pop up (get it?) in lists that document what money managers believe are the biggest risks heading into the new year. Those would be the same money managers that are generally constructive on the outlook.

One poll which doesn’t exhibit as much ambiguity is the latest installment of Boston Consulting Group’s annual investor survey. Here’s BCG explaining a bit about who participated:

Over a two-week period during late October and early November 2017, BCG surveyed 250 investors who oversee approx­imately $500 billion in assets, soliciting their outlook on and expectations for the global macroeconomic environment, equity markets, and the continued ability of companies they invest in or follow to create value. Almost three-quarters of the survey respondents were portfolio managers; 63% focused on the US, while most of the others invested globally.

Well as it turns out, investors surveyed by BCG are the most bearish they’ve been since the crisis as “nearly half of the survey respondents (46%) are pessimistic about equity markets for the next year, a substantial jump from 32% in 2016 and 19% in 2015.”

Here’s some further color:

More than a third of investors (36%) are bearish about the market’s potential for the next three years, more than doubling the 2016 survey’s percentage of self-described bears (16%). Overall, 68% of respondents think the market is overvalued–by an ­average of 15 percentage points. This is more than twice the 29% of investors in last year’s survey who thought the market was overvalued. Among self-described bears in the 2017 survey, 79% cited market overvaluation as the reason for their pessimism.

Investors’ concerns are not limited to valuation levels. Almost a decade after the ­financial crisis struck, nearly 80% of investors expect a recession to start within the next three years, and more than half of all respondents expect one to occur within the next two years. (See Exhibit 1.)

Of course none of that matters, because until all of these ostensibly “bearish” people start voting with their feet, they will paradoxically render their own predictions inaccurate.

Remember, “you can say no, but it’s inconsequential.”