Promise and Payback
CFA Society St. Louis Forecast Dinner 2025
January 30, 2025
Written by Alec Hubbard, CFA
While CFA societies evolve their offerings to align with an ever-changing industry, certain events remain enshrined in the expectations of participating charterholders. One such event is the Annual Forecast Dinner, and to rise to those expectations, on January 30, CFA Society St. Louis hosted its 2025 Annual Forecast Dinner at the Hilton Frontenac. Drawing a wide crowd of investment professionals, the event began with the Society’s president, Ryan Tomlinson, CFA, celebrating the Society’s achievements and sponsors. This included First Trust Global Portfolios, Greenbacker, Guggenheim, and Tri-State Capital. He then highlighted the Society’s upcoming events (which can be found here:) https://www.cfasociety.org/stlouis/events/calendar?CommunityKey=5a6cbe4d-4bc2-470a-b8cd-0185e47e811c.
Dr. Nong Lin, CFA then presented the winners of the Bull’s Eye annual forecast competition, and board member Dan Connor, CFA introduced the next generation of the forecast competition, the Virtual Stock Picking Game (Registration is still open:) https://www.stocktrak.com/members/register?sessionid=319030.
Wrapping up introductions, Vice President and Program Chair Sean Stout, CFA then introduced the featured speaker, Andrew Opdyke, CFA. A senior economist with First Trust, Opdyke’s team is consistently rated well by Bloomberg in their proficiency at forecasting economic indicators, and in 2022 was ranked Number 1 in GDP Growth and CPI. He works on First Trust’s ‘Monday Morning Outlook’ which is a weekly publication that, in 2017, won an award for being the most read/shared thought leadership. Andrew, like many in attendance, is a CFA Charterholder and he spent time outlining the state of the economy in 2025.
Opdyke opened with a stark reminder that the logic behind the theory of how markets are supposed to work can play out differently than anticipated. He demonstrated this by highlighting that the Federal Reserve, with more than 400 Ph.D.s versed in market theory on staff, admits uncertainty about what comes next even while they express confidence with their course of action. He pointed to a history of forecast efforts on the Fed’s part that has been less than accurate or impressive compared to other organizations and reminded the audience of the Fed’s notorious claim that inflation in the COVID era would be ‘transitory.’ He spoke on just how challenging the Fed’s task is by reminding the attendees just how many relevant variables happen in a complex global economy that a central bank cannot control. For example, in 2022 the Fed was anticipating 3 rate hikes. In reality, the increased interest rate was 17 times higher, in large part because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represented a significant geopolitical incident that they couldn’t anticipate or control.
Opdyke described COVID as a metaphorical car crash for the economy where the economy ‘broke its legs.’ In a car crash, paramedics would check your vitals, but in this metaphor the Fed was a doctor who gave the patient morphine. Opdyke then exclaimed, “If the doctor asked how you are feeling with your broken leg, it is not the doctor’s job to send you home if you say you feel great!”
Transitioning from the Fed’s predictive and prescriptive abilities, Andrew pointed to areas in the economy where he sees potential for disruption. President Donald Trump seeks to address taxes, immigration, and trade. In his first administration, he had the same focus areas, but the markets didn’t respond to them intuitively. The predominant example used was that the 2018 tax cuts rocketed earnings over 20% but the financial markets that year were tough. Opdyke described how finding savings to extend the tax cuts would be difficult. He alluded to the Grace Committee’s effort under the Reagan administration in 1982, who were only able to get 5% of the budget cuts they proposed through Congress under a similar mandate. He also cautioned that spending pullbacks will lead to short-term pains before realizing gains and will have economic consequences because Federal deficit spending has supported GDP Growth.
With respect to tariffs, Opdyke pointed out that the U.S. currently has a lower tariff rate than many of its major trading partners. He also proposed that while the tariffs on China were understandable, given their troubled relationship with copyright law, he believes the Canada and Mexico tariffs are posturing, because the USMCA trade deal is coming up for renewal, and he warranted this belief by stating that Canada and Mexico have come to rely on the U.S. with 87% of Canada’s exports being to the U.S. and more than 80% of Mexico’s exports. Another mitigating factor to the impact of tariffs, Opdyke pointed out, was the last Trump administration’s implementation involved an 11-month lead time and opportunities for companies to apply for exemptions. Finally, under Trump’s protectionist first term, the U.S. saw purchases from abroad increase, not decrease. Even in areas where China suffered from U.S. trade policy, countries like Taiwan and Malasia were large beneficiaries. That said, Opdyke reminded the audience that the big difference this time is supply chain concerns that were raised during COVID and the demand to reshore. Finally, Opdyke demonstrated that, while tariffs can cause inflation in specific categories, they don’t do a lot broadly. Combined with an emphasis on immigrants leaving the U.S., the economic shifts in the coming years will be influenced by changes on the supply and demand side.
Opdyke then moved to make some interesting points about jobs. Over the last 18 months, he pointed out, 60% of job gains were in government and healthcare. In fact, he showed with Bureau of Labor Statistics Data that in only 2 months of the last 18 months, had the job growth of all of the other areas combined to surpass Government and Healthcare alone. He also pointed out that while we have seen job growth, the quality of jobs is a point of contention. Again using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Opdyke showed that while job growth has recovered since the Pandemic, there has been a decline in full time employment. Opdyke made a case that this data is very important, despite being less than pronounced in the Bureau’s reports, because every other time full-time job growth has gone negative, historically, we have seen a recession.
Opdyke covered inflation by pointing out that production of goods ramped up during the COVID Pandemic, because the cost of production was heavily subsidized by low interest rates and the incentive to take advantage of government subsidized loans. The increase in production was not following economic fundamentals, because factory orders and production were both down. Now that COVID lockdowns have ended, inflation is being seen much more prominently in services. He estimated inflation in the coming year will likely be in the 2.5-3% range.
Opdyke also covered the changing capital markets. Because lenders can now get paid in the fixed income market, he detailed that the cost of capital has increased. In spite of that, equity markets have gotten greedy expressed through heavily concentrated markets with P/E ratios far above historic averages for the largest companies. Markets are now more concentrated than they have been since 1930, and more concentrated than in the early 2000s when the catalyst driving them was the internet. Opdyke reminded the audience that even though investors vastly underestimated the impact the internet would have on modern society, investors were not especially good at investing in the internet in the early 2000s where the big names at the time were Cisco, GE, Exxon and AOL. Opdyke reiterated that A.I. represents a tremendous opportunity, but asked “what if instead of running to the same door, you expanded your reach?”
###