From his previous career as an investment strategist, your correspondent is accustomed to putting his neck on the line with market predictions and often as not having his head handed back to him.
So here is the Monitor forecast for the Hang Seng Index next year.
The starting point is not Hong Kong but the United States. It is so not only because we have a direct link to the United States in our currency peg and many indirect links besides, but because the US is just so big in financial markets that you cannot really talk markets in the world anywhere without talking markets in the US.
Next year is the year the bubble in the US deflates. This has been a standard prediction of New Year forecasts for many years but your correspondent's excuse for offering it now is that this is the first time he has in fact done so.
The reason it deflates, and take note here that the choice of word is 'deflates', not 'bursts', is that US interest rates have no way to go but up next year.
They will do so first of all because every US inflation indicator bar the consumer price index (CPI) has shown a sharp swing upwards over the past year.