Schafer: Piper's stock guru says bull market is here to stay

The stock market has already zoomed to record highs this year, but Craig Johnson is out this week with a bold prediction that it's going a lot higher.

Piper Jaffray's stock market strategist forecasts that the closely watched S&P 500 index will climb more than 18 percent by the end of next year.

Better pay attention, too. He's lately been right. Very right.

In August 2012, Johnson predicted that the S&P 500 index would reach 2,000 within two years, and it did on Monday morning, the 25th of August. Considering the weekend had no trading, Johnson actually missed his "2,000 in two years" forecast by just a single day.

In the investment business, an analyst can make a nice living by being approximately correct, maybe even by not being routinely wrong. Johnson hasn't just been proved right. It's roughly akin to the Las Vegas sports guru who not only predicts the final score of the Super Bowl but also perfectly calls the set list of the halftime show.

The reason he didn't just enjoy this big win and then go stand on the sidelines is that he doesn't think it was a short-term increase in stock prices. It's a long-term, "secular" bull market.

The term secular means a long-term trend that may have a few ups and downs along the way. And, Johnson added, we're not only in a secular bull market, but we are closer to the beginning than the end. His new report, released late Tuesday, runs 293 pages, but for those with short attention spans the cover title is enough: "Let the Good Times Roll."

"What I'm saying is the new secular bull market is here," he continued. "I'm not sure if you're going to make 15 times your money, but you're probably going to make multiples of your money."

Johnson started developing these views over two years ago, and as he put it, "it drives me nuts" when market analysts don't make forecasts with specific dates. Predicting that the S&P 500 will reach 2,350 isn't that helpful if it takes 10 extra years to get there.

So what he did two years ago was to put some specific forecast numbers by specific dates. With the S&P 500 in late summer 2012 trading at about 1,413, he wrote that it would rise to 1,550 in six months' time, with a 12-month target of 1,700 and a two-year objective of 2,000.

He then went on the financial cable television channel CNBC to discuss his views. When the producer found out what he wanted to talk about, that the S&P 500 will be shooting to 2,000 in two years, Johnson was offered the chance back out. They would just blame technical difficulties.

"I said that's not going to happen, let's do it," he said. "They thought I'd lost my mind."

Johnson, you see, is a chartered market technician, one of those traders and analysts who stare intently at charts of prices and talk about breakouts, head and shoulders tops, island reversals and Fibonacci retracements.

Setting aside all the jargon, all a technical analyst is really doing is looking at the patterns in historical data arranged in a chart and then trying to predict what's going to happen next.

They don't just track stocks. More like anything that has a price, even things like farm fertilizer.

But there isn't a bright line between a technical analyst like Johnson and a fundamental analyst, who makes forecasts based on observations about the economy and other factors. Just as a fundamental analyst also looks closely at price charts, Johnson talks about his price charts as "the shortcut to the fundamentals."

His secular bull market case sounds pretty fundamental, too. He thinks stocks will go up because the economy is improving and corporate profits are going to increase, and also because there are fewer stocks to buy than there used to be. He also thinks interest rates will rise.

Johnson is looking for the good kind of rising interest rates, a trend that would indicate greater demand for money because the economy is gathering strength.

Rising interest rates also should mean that investors start selling their poorly performing bonds and fixed income mutual funds and buy stocks with the money. That will give stocks a further nudge higher.

While Johnson made little a splash with his 2012 prediction, in September 2014 a positive long-term forecast for the stock market is far more common. "I almost see it as a consensus," said Jim Paulsen, a similarly bullish fundamental investment strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis. "Which bothers me."

Johnson said he doesn't regularly really read the work of other market strategists. If everybody in his profession is optimistic, Johnson said, that would probably be cause for some caution. Having everybody agree something's going to keep going up in price usually means it's poised to start declining.

"But I was here in 2000," Johnson said, remembering the overheated market fueled by technology stocks that carried the Nasdaq index to its all-time high above 5,000 before collapsing. "And today it doesn't feel at all like it did then."