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The Dow is at another all-time today. The index is now up to 12,468.

Last year, Business Week asked its readers to vote on where the Dow would be at the end of 2006. Here are the results:

10,000 or below.........................15.1%
Around 10,500............................13.1%
Around 11,000............................24.3%
Around 11,500............................28.3%
12,000 or higher.........................15.8%
Not sure......................................3.4%

Sheesh, what was everyone so gloomy about? For from being irrational or even exuburent, the crowd was very tame. Less than one in six got it right. Here's what I wrote at the time:

That means that the median is "around 11,000." I won’t predict that the Dow will hit 12,000, but I think it’s entirely reasonable that it could. That’s a little over 10% from where it is today which is in the middle of the long-term average. Yet only one in six respondents said "12,000 or higher." Strange.

I normally would expect polls like this to be overly optimistic. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, or perhaps the public is much more pessimistic that I realized.

The professionals were even gloomier. Here were the predictions of 76 market pros. The Dow is currently higher than all but three of their forecasts.

Ticker Sense points out that the latest Barron's roundup of market pros sees the Dow headed to 13,220. That's only 6% from where we are now.

Posted by edelfenbein at December 15, 2006 10:48 AM