Guru Grades

Total Bob Doll (Last Updated 9/28/07)

We evaluate here the weekly commentary of Merrill Lynch's Bob Doll from January 2003 (the earliest available) through September 2006. Bob Doll was President and CIO of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, the firm's asset management arm. With the October 2006 merger of this group with Blackrock Inc., Mr. Doll's commentary for Merrill Lynch is discontinued. The table below extracts highlights from this commentary and shows the performance of the S&P 500 index over the 5, 21, 63 and 254 trading days after the publication date for each item. Red plus (minus) signs to the right of specific items indicate those that the market has subsequently proven right (wrong). We conclude that:

• Bob Doll was mostly positive about the U.S. economy and U.S. equities during January 2003 through September 2006, in general alignment with market performance. While writing weekly, he often addresses intermediate and long term outlooks.
• He often cites oil prices and the Federal Funds Rate as critical factors for both the economy and the stock market.
• Based on subsequent stock market performance and our judgments about the accuracy of Mr. Doll's forecasts, his bottom-line advice about market direction was correct 54% of the time, somewhat above average. These percentages exclude a few commentaries in which we could not discern forecasts of market direction. His forecast sample size is moderate, as is therefore our confidence in this conclusion.
• It is relatively difficult to assess the accuracy of Mr. Doll's market projections because of conditionalities and vagueness.
• As noted above Bob Doll's commentary for Merrill Lynch has been discontinued. We retain this record for historical reference as part of an overall analysis of guru accuracy.

In summary, Bob Doll is a little above average in forecasting stock market behavior. Confidence in this conclusion is moderate.

See Guru Grades for a snapshot of the accuracy of various experts in predicting the direction of the U.S. stock market, including links to evaluations of the commentaries of other individual market pundits and gurus.

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