Doom and gloom in 2010? Sentiment from the weekend papers

Picture: djjeck at Flickr

Pundits, we love them. It is just as well really as they were out in force in the personal finance pages at the weekend as the first weekend of the New Year offered up predictions galore for the coming year.

A quick totting up of who was saying what showed that positive outlooks outnumbered negative ones three to two, with around 60 percent of pundits and editors taking the view that the glass might just be half full after all.

Sitting firmly in the glass half empty camp, however, was the Telegraph’s Ian Cowie who has sold part of his own Emerging Markets portfolio while the gains are still there to be had, as well as the Guardian’s Katie Allen who focused on what a bad year 2009 was for private sector pension funds.
Ethical investing forged the path back to positive sentiment, with Rob Gleeson’s Trustnet article in the Telegraph lifting the gloom a little. But the prize for most positive goes to The Independent’s focus on stock market and whether it will climb in 2010 giving a positive mention (contrary to Ian Cowie’s view) to emerging markets among other sectors.
We were also treated to a raft of handy financial planning hints and top tips for 2010, some genuinely inspiring and worthy of putting into action and others deserved to be firmly labelled with a certain phrase with a nod to the super sleuth of Baker Street.