U.S. stocks climbed a wall of worry in 2014 underpinned by a host of nettlesome concerns at home and abroad.
While Wall Street’s brightest are somewhat subdued but still upbeat on the outlook for 2015, investors should always be aware of the risks that lie beneath the surface.
Not all of them rise to the “black-swan” level, which describes the most unexpected events. Gray swans are occurrences that aren’t wholly unpredictable, but are insidiously laying in plain sight. Gray swans can be equally as problematic as Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s highly improbable “Black Swan”. In 2014,the outbreak of Ebola, classified to us as a gray-swan event, especially since the deadly virus isn’t new and this isn’t the first Ebola outbreak, though it was the first to reach U.S. shores.
Here’s a collection of MarketWatch’s own “gray swans” to watch out for in 2015.
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