tterloo & Co. caters mostly to high-net-worth and institutional investors. It runs $140-plus billion in assets, including 10 retail mutual-funds. Those include JHancock3 International Core Fund (GIDEX) , Evergreen Asset Allocation Fund (EAAFX) and Vanguard U.S. Value Fund (VUVLX) . Ben Inker, GMO's head of asset allocation :
In the doldrums
GMO doesn't foresee most stock classes turning a profit from this point through 2013.
"The major factor confusing a lot of people now is that the price-earnings ratio of the market doesn't look that bad from a historical perspective," Inker said. "But the earnings part of the equation is at unsustainable levels. And that's around the world, not just in the U.S."
Megacap blue chips are the best of the lot, he added. "Their profitability is so stable, if we're right, these guys won't fall as much as more cyclical stocks," Inker said.
The typical small-cap stock, on the other hand, is looking the most vulnerable.
The firm isn't advising investors to dump stocks, however. "But very few people act as if they have more than a seven-year investment horizon," Inker noted.
The time to bulk up in stocks is after they've taken a steep fall, he says.
The overall U.S. stock market would have to drop 35% to 40% to hit GMO's estimate of fair-value pricing. In foreign markets, that decline could be a bit less.
For investors interested in slicing and dicing their fund portfolios between value and growth, Inker says blue-chip growth names appear best positioned to outperform heading into a new year.
"The problem is that value stocks usually win over the longer term," he said. "So you want to buy growth when it's trading at absolutely the cheapest valuations."
But growth stocks still aren't at such low levels, Inker says. "In the U.S., we're pretty even right now in value vs. growth valuations," he said. "So we've put a chunk of our assets into blue-chip stocks. And those tend to show up in more traditional growth sectors."
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