Now is the season for pontificating on whether stocks keep on motoring higher in 2022, and if so, at what pace. The problem is, that is a tricky question.
So, how to answer it? For the discerning markets pundit who honestly has no idea what will happen next, “um, I don’t know, it depends” is a bad response.
The second-to-last resort is to use precise probabilities. “A 60 per cent chance that Greece leaves the euro” was a classic of the genre among economists in the European debt crisis. The equivalent now would be to identify a 60 per cent chance that stock markets crash. Sixty is your sweet spot here — a high enough number to look serious and crow about it for the rest of your career if you are right, but low enough to give a get-out if it does not happen.