ANALYSTS BOOST ’98 DOW CALLS: BEATEN IN 3 MONTHS!

As the stock market scaled record heights yet again last week, Wall Street’s bullish prognosticators were doing what they always do when estimates are off kilter: stampeding back to their calculators to revise them upward.

They’ve already seen the Dow Jones Industrial Average surpass 8,800. So much for predictions the market would revert back to its historic gains of 8% to 10% annually.

When Abby Joseph Cohen, Goldman Sachs & Co.’s co-chairwoman of the investment policy committee, saw the Dow burst through her predicted yearend level of 8,700 last week, she revised her full-year estimate to 9,300 and upped her targets for the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index (to 1,150 from 1,075) and Nasdaq (to 1,900 from 1,776).

Even those who have not yet been proven wrong are upping the ante. At Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York, investment strategist Ronald Hill raised his yearend Dow forecast to 9,400 from 9,000 and his S&P projection to 1,150 from 1,100.

Some Wall Street strategists admit these revisions make them queasy. After all, there are another three quarters left of 1998.”It’s hard to forecast that gains in stock prices will accelerate four or five years into a recovery,” Mr. Hill says. “This has been pretty phenomenal.”

Despite warning of disappointing first quarter earnings in oil and technology stocks, U.S. corporate earnings are coming in at expected levels, says Mr. Hill.

He foresees earnings growth of 8.8% in 1998, vs. 10.7% in 1997. Investors seem to have dismissed the Asian crisis, and are continuing to pour money into stocks. Never mind the S&P’s whopping 27.5 price/earnings ratio.

Indeed, Ralph Acampora, Prudential Securities Inc.’s director of technical analysis, is about to reaffirm his bold prediction that the Dow Jones would reach 10,000 “and then some” by the end of the year. Friday it closed at 8,906.