No stock recovery until Q3: CIBC economist

Investors should wait until the third quarter of 2009 before buying stocks, one Canadian bank's chief economist said Wednesday.

Despite the year-long slump in equity prices, Canada's economic picture is still too cloudy for the next few months to warrant any sort of stock-buying spree by investors, Jeff Rubin, CIBC's chief economist, said in his latest predictions for the Toronto Stock Exchange.

"There is simply too much downward movement in the marketplace for today's valuation to serve as an attractive buying opportunity."

Essentially, while many forecasters see a Canadian economic recovery in the cards in the next six months, Rubin said that scenario is not a given.

Gross domestic product in both Canada and the United States should continue to shrink in the second quarter, he said. As well, the U.S. banking crisis will keep leaking into the valuations of Canadian financial institutions, driving down the stock market prices of Canada's banks and other finance firms, Rubin said.

The TSX should begin to recover by the end of 2009, Rubin said, but only to a level equal to its closing one year earlier.

"Even with a second-half recovery, it is hard to see the TSX beyond 9,000 by the end of the year," Rubin said.

The reticence among investors to buy already-cheap stocks, experts said, could depress equity values.

Canada's main stock exchange closed 2008 at 8,988, already well off of its peaks of last summer.

Once a recovery takes hold, Canadians could see a TSX at 11,000 by the end of 2010, still 30 per cent below these lofty level of mid-2008, CIBC said.