“We have gone too long without a 10 percent market correction.”

We’ve all heard these kinds of statements to justify doom & Gloom predictions for 2015. I think it’s all BS. This kind of background noise is always with us and is rarely correct. My fearless prediction for 2015 is that we will enjoy 8 percent return in the overall market for the year based on the S&P-500.

We actually had a 9.83% sell-off at the end of 2014. Note that there is indeed a difference between a pullback / correction and a crash. The generally-accepted ranges are: 5% = dip, 5-10% = pullback, 10-20% = correction and +0% = crash. There's more to it, but the guidelines are pretty universal. So, is it really reasonable to argue that a 9.83% sell-off (0.17% shy of 10%) doesn't qualify as a 10% correction? Yes, I'm aware that the 9.83% bottom was only intraday, but my point remains the same, in that perhaps the purpose of a correction was still served. An attorney might refer to this as a question of "the spirit of the law, versus the letter of the law."

Yes, our Bull-Market is middle aged but historically we’ve experienced many market runs that went beyond a single decade. The 1982-2000 Secular Bull Market (18 years)---The 1966-1982 Secular Bear Market (16 years) and the 1949-1966 Secular Bull Market (17 years). Our Price / Earnings ratio stands at just a wee-bit over the historic mean and the last batch of earnings reports had 71% of the company’s reporting meeting or beating their forecasts.