In our first Wealth Note of 2011, we updated our 1-year stock market target for the S & P 500 to 1,440 while for the TSX we called for a target of 15,000. However, we also posed the question as to how realistic were our conservative targets. Our response was as follows: “The answer lies in the strength of the economic recovery in 2011/12 both in North America and globally, which is unusually hard to gauge at the present time. However adamant forecasters might be about the correctness of their views, the outlook is fraught with uncertainty and so no crystal ball can be that clear. Never before have governments and central banks around the world co-operated to the degree they did in providing stimulus from the fall of 2008 to the spring of 2009. However, what that means when all the fiscal stimulus programs expire and the central banks start to withdraw liquidity, nobody can now tell with any degree of confidence. We will just have to make those judgments closer to the time. While the jury will remain out on these outcomes over the next few quarters, however, we do believe that there should be good upside potential in North American equity markets on account of the extremely high levels of liquidity in the system created by quantitative easing in the face of economies working well below potential”.