When, oh when, will we see accuracy in media among the so-called “mainstream reporters”?
A prime example from today - Goldman’s Cohen call on the markets:
Goldman Sachs sees the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index in a range of 1,050-1,100 toward year-end, said Cohen, the firm’s senior investment strategist and president of its Global Markets Institute. That range, she said, “is where we should be toward the end of this year.
“We do think the new bull market has begun,” Cohen said. “It may prove it began in March of this year.”
Read the rest of the article. Nowhere will you see reference to Cohen’s actual record - including her disastrous and similar call just last year:
But Abby Joseph Cohen, the superbull at Goldman Sachs, maintained that the Dow would roar back to finish 2008 at a level 22 percent higher — 14,750 is the number — as the economy perks up later in the year.
The economy “perks up” through the year?
If you listened to Abby Cohen in January of 2008, when the Dow was at 12,000 and change, you lost over 3,000 DOW points, or 25%, as opposed to gaining 22%, for a total error of nearly FIFTY PERCENT .vs. her prognostication.
By any measurement this is a catastrophically-bad performance and if your portfolio was invested “per her recommendations” you got destroyed.
Yet the Tout Media is absolutely silent and holds Cohen forth as some sort of “Guru” instead of pointing out (justifiably so) that her last call was best traded in the opposite direction - that is, when they said to buy you should have instead gone short!
I note that in 1999 and early 2000 Cohen also made a series of disastrously-bad calls, one of the most important being right here on 7/3/2000:
When looking for reassurance, investors have been able to turn to Abby Joseph Cohen. This time is no different. Cohen, one of Wall Street’s most prominent bulls, remains upbeat on stocks despite a slowdown in corporate profits. “What matters most is that profits are sustainable and durable, which we think they are,” she says. Still, the Goldman Sachs strategist stresses that “gains in stock prices will be less robust” than in recent years.
Forecast: Cohen predicts the Dow will end the year at 12,600 vs. 10,398 and the S&P 500 at 1575, vs. 1442 now. She expects the Nasdaq, now at 3877, to lag.
Actual results?
On 12/31/2000 the SPX closed at 1320 and the DOW closed at 10,646.
Far worse, if you held on the S&P and Dow (along with the Nasdaq) were just starting their bear market decline - a decline that crushed you in the next two years, with the S&P declining to under 800!
How does “Tout Media” manage to get away with this? Why do their advertisers and viewers and readers put up with this?
How many hundreds of billions of investor dollars need to be lost before the people rise up and demand accountability and an HONEST reporting of these Touts’ record on their PAST calls before they give public air to their CURRENT ones?
