摩根斯坦利的前任全球策略官Barton Biggs近期在为新书“Wealth, War and Wisdom”做宣传时顺便对美股发表了看法。此君目前在合伙掌管Traxis Partners对冲基金,资产规模在15亿美元——关于这个基金的故事,有兴趣的朋友可以看其此前的著作《对冲基金风云录》。作为这个行当的资深行家,其意见是不能不考虑的,尤其实在其去年3月和8月成功预言美股将很快见底之后。下面便是从Bloomberg摘引的采访部分内容(粗体为本人认为重要的观点):
LIU: Right. All right, Barton, well then let’s talk a little bit more about the larger investing strategy in themarkets overall. You’ve said before that the "when the abyssis on the front page" your end-clients have bet against thedoomsayers. How is that depicted in your investing strategyat this point or going forward? What are you – what aresome of the contrarian bets that you’re making right now?
BIGGS: Well, our view is that we’re either at or veryclose to an important bottom. And that right in this area,from 1275 to 1325 on the S&P, the U.S. market, which stillthe S&P was still ruled the world, is trying to dig in andmake a bottom. And it’s making that bottom at about the samelevel as it made its first bottom like this three weeks ago.And so we’re gradually increasing our risk and our exposureto equities.
And in terms of contrarian bets, well, we have acontrarian bet that the investment banks, that thefinancials, are going to be strong performers when and if the market rallies. And they’ve obviously been – they’reobviously a group that has been crushed here and everybodyis very negative on and they continue to decline and actedbadly last week, but if the market rallies, there’s a lot ofshorts in the investment banks, and they are extremelyoversold. And so I can see a 20, 25 percent rally in a lotof those stocks and occurring over a short period of time,two or three weeks.LIU: And do you think, Barton, that the rally is primarily because of the Fed rate cut?
BIGGS: No, the – well the rally – they’ve certainly -the Fed rate cut helps a lot. The fiscal stimulus programhelps a little. All kinds of normal adjustments that are occurring, like the decline in treasury yields, isincreasing the amount of refi that’s going on and so a lotof things are occurring.
But it’s – the important thing for us is that the markets, by all our measures, is very oversold, that there is a great deal of bearishness and we can – we tracksentiment in a consistent quantitative rational way, wehope, and it shows that sentiment is very extreme.
And then at the same time, you’re seeing that evaluations, compared to inflation, compared to interestrates, compared to – the whole series of measures,valuations are very, very cheap. And so it’s hard not to bebullish, unless you think we’re going into some kind ofcredit abyss. And I think that’s unlikely.LIU: You know Barton, I just want to get very quicklyin the minute that we have to get your outlook on oil forinstance, which is certainly a commodity that gets affectedby such events like wars.
You’ve written recently in Newsweek that a year fromnow, stocks, the dollar, inflation, will be higher, and oil,gold, and the euro lower. Where do you think oil could betrading a year from now?BIGGS: Well I think oil could be – I think oil could bearound $80, $80 a barrel. And that’s lower, that’s not ahuge decline, but it’s a change in the upward momentum. I’msure oil’s going to $150 or $200 in the next three, five,seven years. But it would – can it go to $80 in the next sixor seven months in a worldwide slowdown? Absolutely.

张佳昺,CFA(特许金融分析师)