Rallied out or ready to roll again?

摘要

Bull market or bear market rally, stocks will have a hard time matching the strong 2003 pace and may drift sideways. But it is an election year, so policies favor the upside, and China's a growing factor. If the job of a market is to confuse traders and keep as many as possible from participating in a price move, then the stock market has done a pretty good job in the last year. A year ago, heading into the attack on Iraq, uncertainty was the major theme (see "Stocks at war," March 2003). Not many analysts were thinking in terms of a bull market like the 43% advance in the S&P 500 index ― and much bigger gains than that in other major indexes (see "Running of the bulls," right) ― that unfolded from the March 2003 low to the close at the end of January 2004 (although analyst John Rawlins' cycle program did project a major low in the Dow Jones Industrial Average near the end of the first quarter in the "Tech. Talk" that accompa-nied the March 2003 article).