Is it time to push risk to the max?

What a difference a new year – and a few billion euros of cheap central bank loans – makes. Since last October when the FTSE last dipped below the 5000 mark, sentiment has been transformed. The gloom that pervaded the market in the final quarter of last year seems to have been banished and replaced by sunny optimism. This upbeat mood is evident anecdotally: some prominent bearish sell-side strategists have all but capitulated and now counsel a neutral or even overweight stance in equities. More quantifiably, stock-market indices have risen so far that the 2012 year-end point targets t...