Applying Roubini Wisdom to Stocks Means Missing Out

By Whitney Kisling

Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Making money on the thinking of Nouriel Roubini isn’t what it used to be.

The New York University professor, who in 2006 foretold the worst financial unraveling since the Great Depression, has yet to say the economy is worth investing in again. “There is a big risk of a double-dip recession,” wrote Roubini, also known as Dr. Doom, in his column in the Financial Times this week.

Anyone attempting to apply Roubini’s wisdom to stocks may be forgiven for missing the biggest rally since the 1930s as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index climbed 52 percent in six months. While Roubini said in March the advance was a “dead-cat bounce,” that it may “fizzle” in May and warned in July that the economy’s “not out of the woods,” the MSCI World Index was posting a 58 percent gain, the largest since it began in 1970.

“We’re looking at a bull cycle in phase one,” Laszlo Birinyi said in a telephone interview yesterday. Birinyi was the top-ranked Dow Jones Industrial Average forecaster for most of the 1990s on PBS’s “Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser.” “No one wants to come out and say, ‘This is a bull market.’ Everyone’s just dancing around the term,” he said.

The S&P 500 added 14 percent since Westport, Connecticut- based Birinyi Associates Inc., which manages $350 million, said on May 20 that a bull market had begun, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Roubini, who forecast in October 2008 that the U.S. was in a recession that would last 24 months, said on March 9 that the index might fall back to 600. It has risen to 1,028 since then.

$4 Trillion Gained

Futures on the S&P 500 added 0.2 percent to 1,028.40 as of 1:09 a.m. in New York. The MSCI World Index was little changed.

About $4 trillion has been restored to U.S. equity markets since March following better-than-forecast corporate profits and signs of an improving economy. More than 72 percent of the S&P 500’s companies beat analysts’ average estimates for second- quarter earnings, matching the highest proportion since Bloomberg began tracking the data in 1993. The Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has risen four consecutive months.

Roubini’s July 2006 warning about the financial crisis protected investors from losses in the S&P 500’s worst annual tumble in seven decades. He also correctly warned investors to avoid stocks following the steepest advances in 2008.

On Dec. 12, he said U.S. stocks might fall 20 percent after the S&P 500 gained 17 percent in three weeks. The index lost 23 percent through March 9, 2009. During an 18 percent jump in the index between Oct. 27 and Nov. 4, Roubini warned the S&P 500 might reverse course and lose 30 percent. It dropped 28 percent through March.

‘Understand the Market’

He may have missed this year’s bull market because Roubini isn’t focused on stocks, according to Birinyi.

Roubini has “done a very good job on the economy,” Birinyi said in an interview Aug. 24. “Our approach is to try to understand the market and not try to do much more than that.”

Jonathan D. Goldberg, a New York-based spokesman for Roubini, said he wasn’t available to comment because he’s on vacation.

Roubini, 51, wrote this week in the Financial Times that the economy may worsen again even after it stops shrinking this year. The global contraction will bottom in the second half of 2009, and the recession in the U.S. won’t be “formally over” before the end of the year, he said.

‘Fizzle Out’

The forecast was a reiteration of Roubini’s call for an 18- to 24-month contraction that he made in October 2008. The recession began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee.

Roubini told Bloomberg Television on May 13 that the stock market’s rally “might fizzle out,” citing expectations for weak growth in earnings. On March 9, he said it was “highly likely” the S&P 500 would fall to 600 or below because of plunging profits, an accelerating contraction in the global economy and a deteriorating outlook for banks.

The index reached a 12-year low of 676.53 that day and has since climbed for almost six months. Reports on industrial production, housing starts and car sales, along with comments from the Federal Reserve that the economy is “leveling out,” helped boost equities in the world’s largest economy.

In July 2006, Roubini predicted the financial crisis that led to $1.6 trillion in credit-related losses and writedowns. He forecast a “catastrophic” meltdown in February 2008, leading to the bankruptcy of large banks with mortgage holdings and a “sharp drop” in equities.

Bear Stearns, Lehman

Since then, Bear Stearns Cos. and Merrill Lynch & Co. were taken over, American International Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. required government bailouts and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for the world’s biggest bankruptcy. All the companies were based in New York.

Birinyi, 65, who spent a decade on the trading desk at Salomon Brothers Inc. before founding Birinyi Associates in 1989, said on May 20 that the S&P 500 may reach 1,700 by 2011, shifting from his April 13 call that the market had risen too much “by almost every measure.” In October 2007, he told investors to avoid bank stocks, saying bad loans and lower revenue from underwriting would damp earnings. The S&P 500 Financials Index then plunged 82 percent through March 6, 2009.

“Both of them just have a pretty deep understanding of the history of economic and business cycles,” said Eric Teal, who oversees $5 billion as chief investment officer at First Citizens Bank in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Roubini has just had more of an academic background, whereas Birinyi has been much more in the spotlight managing money and working in capital markets.”

Growth Forecasts

The U.S. economy has contracted four straight quarters. It will expand 2.2 percent during the third quarter and 2 percent in the fourth, before growing 2.3 percent in 2010, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

Roubini, who received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1988, was a member of Yale University’s faculty until joining NYU in 1995. He started his consulting firm, Roubini Global Economics LLC, in 2004, providing subscribers access to written and broadcast commentary and archived data. The firm’s 1,300 institutional clients include asset managers and hedge funds, as well as investment banks and universities. Roubini doesn’t invest any money on behalf of customers.

“There’s a lot more weight behind pundits who put their money where their mouth is,” said Jack Ablin, who oversees $60 billion as chief investment officer of Harris Private Bank in Chicago. “Where I get up and pay attention is when I see someone who’s been bearish go bullish.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Whitney Kisling in New York at wkisling@bloomberg.net.