Bull market's last charge

AMP Capital has released its latest quarterly outlook, noting that it expected international equity markets to head towards a "final climax" of the longest bull market in history this year.

"For many asset classes, returns effectively ‘fell off a cliff’ in December, with year-to-date gains erased in a concentrated near-panic that pulled the key US equity market down from October by -19.6% at the Christmas Eve lows  the end of a bull market)," it noted.

"While some of the forces driving that correction are undeniable, such as slowing global growth and corporate earnings, political risks in the US and UK, a sluggish Europe and uncertainty over China, oil and trade, we believe that the degree of weakness seen in December was greatly overdone.

"The New Year brought a reconsideration of the prevailing negativity. This has been expressed in a rally in global equities, which are now up by more than 5% only three weeks into 2019. The scale of the sentiment reversal is shown by the S&P 500 index, which having bottomed in the last week of December, has subsequently staged a 14% rebound."