Poll du Jour: Stock market – up, down, or sideways?

Submitted By Prieur du Plessis

Further to my post of yesterday posing the question “US stock market returns - what is in store?”, let’s shorten the time horizon and consider the outlook for the next few months as opposed to the longer term.

It has become a national pastime (or survival strategy for some?) to try to figure out where in the stock market cycle we are. Adding to the complexity of arriving at an answer is Marc Faber’s (The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report) viewpoint that “we’ve moved into an environment of very high volatility where you will have up and down moves of like 20% all the time … We can have huge rebounds and then huge downturns again …”

Dear readers, this is where I am going to rely on your collective wisdom and ask you to express your opinion on the direction of the stock market. We will consider three forecast periods and focus specifically on whether the Dow Jones Industrial Index will be up or down from its current level (8,592) by (1) December 31, 2008, (2) June 30, 2009, and (3) December 31, 2009 respectively.

All you need to do is think about this for a short while or “throw the bones”, and provide your answers by clicking on the appropriate button on each of the three poll images below.

The poll will run until 22:00 EST on Sunday, December 7, 2008, whereafter the results will be reported on the blog.

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