CORRECTED - FEATURE-J.P. Morgan's Cliggott hits S&P bull's eye
2-
(corrects college attended in 21st paragraph to University of Massachusetts
Amherst, NOT Amherst College)
By Per Jebsen
NEW YORK, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Doug Cliggott turned his back on Wall
Street in 1988, leaving the fast track at top brokerage Merrill Lynch & Co.
Inc. <MER.N> for a five-year stint in Denmark so that his wife, a Dane,
could return to graduate school to work on her psychology dissertation.
A decade later, he turned his back on Wall Street again.
Cliggott, now the chief U.S. equity strategist for J.P. Morgan Chase
<JPM.N>, issued a bearish prediction in December 1999 for the year-end
2000 close of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index -- a prediction that differed
dramatically from those of other top strategists.
"We had had five simply extraordinary years in a row, and I just thought it
was old-fashioned common sense not to push the bet too far, given how
wonderfully the market had treated investors," Cliggott said in a recent
interview with Reuters. "We thought that by the end of 1999, a lot of what
was driving events was of a temporary nature."
He was the only top strategist to venture that the broad gauge of the stock
market would actually fall. His prediction of a 12 percent drop was a full 15
percent below that provided by the next-least optimistic strategist, Goldman
Sachs' Abby Joseph Cohen.
By a smaller margin, Cliggott remains the most pessimistic strategist for
2001 as well, with a 1,400 year-end estimate for the S&P, up only 5 percent
from current levels. |
