UBS Financial Services Managing Director Art Cashin has been a mainstay on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for a half-century now, and after nailing many predictions for 2019, he’s setting his sights on 2020.
Cashin is reversing course on his 2019 stock prediction and thinks the market rally will continue, though maybe not as strong, through the new year.
Before looking ahead to the new year, let’s take a look at Cashin’s big three predictions for 2019 — and how he fared.
Cashin was right on the money with his call that the Federal Reserve would not hike its benchmark interest rate again after four upticks in 2018. Instead, the Fed went the other direction and cut rates three times to a range of 1.5% to 1.75%.
The NYSE legend also said there would be no finalized trade deal between the U.S. and China. He was spot on again, but the two sides have agreed to a phase one deal that hasn’t been signed yet. In the deal, the U.S. has agreed to cancel some tariffs that were supposed to start Dec. 15 while rolling back some other duties that are already in place. In exchange, China has agreed to purchase $40 billion in U.S. agricultural products, along with other “structural” changes that were not specified.
Cashin definitely missed the mark on his stock predictions for 2019, though. He thought stocks would be down in the first half of the year and then flat for the whole of 2019. The S&P 500 has rocketed up over 28% since January, and Cashin attributes that to the Fed’s rate cuts and quantitative easing (which the central bank doesn’t admit is QE) action in the repo markets.
“I think what I missed was, I thought the Fed was stepping out of QE … while I didn’t think they would hike (interest rates), I thought they would stay flat,” Cashin said in a recent interview with CNBC. “And instead what they did, a little bit later in the year, was to decide they were worried about the repo problem, which they still are. And they added, actually, more reserves than they did when they were doing QE. So that had the unexpected benefit of boosting the market and adding more liquidity.”
Cashin’s 2020 Predictions
So what does Cashin think will happen in 2020? His first prediction is that the Fed will not perform any rate hikes, despite the recent strength of the U.S. economy.
“I think the Fed is somewhat intimidated by the market,” Cashin said. “And the market, if anything, thinks the Fed is ahead of itself on higher rates.”
Cashin is reversing course on his 2019 stock prediction and thinks the market rally will continue, though maybe not as strong, through the new year.
“Eight out of nine times that we’ve had an up year like we had this year, it’s followed by another decent up year,” Cashin predicts. “Not quite as strong, but still strong, and so I’ll go with history.”
And while stocks will go up, there will be a lot volatility in the markets. Cashin marks January, March and July as particularly dangerous months.
“In late January, we’ll get to see if there’s going to be a Brexit now that (Prime Minister Boris) Johnson got a sweeping move in Parliament. And will he, in fact, push through a no-deal Brexit? That could make the markets very volatile and jumpy,” Cashin said.
“The next thing will be the U.S. election. Number one, in early March, we will get Super Tuesday, and one-third of the U.S. populace will vote. And we’ll get to find out where (Democrat Michael) Bloomberg’s strategy is. Who looks to be the leader? Has anybody locked it up? If not, then it could be a brokered convention, and that date would be in the middle of July, when the convention will be.”
We’ll have to wait and see how Cashin fares in the new decade.
