Welcome to the worst day of the year for investors, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at stock futures this morning. Thank the portfolio window-dressers or bouncy dead cats, but the market looks set to fly.
Anyway, that gloomy prognosis for the day fits nicely with the disastrous end to the quarter we’re headed for, set to finish with 8% to 9% losses for the big U.S. indexes. The quarter has delivered the biggest point declines for the Dow industrials DJIA, +0.30% and the Nasdaq Composite COMP, -0.59% since the end of 2008, and the biggest for the S&P 500 since 2011.
Wall Street, though, is hoping to brush the quarter under the rug. A Reuters poll of 40 strategists found that most think the worst is over for stocks. (Less bullish, perhaps, is Goldman Sachs, which cut its S&P 500 target to 2,000 yesterday, though its strategist David Kostin cushioned that with a “flat-is-the-new-up” mantra.) Those strategists polled think the S&P will end up at 2,094 by the end of 2015 — a gain of 2% for the year, but 7% below where they thought it would be when asked a few months ago.
