Also, take this for what it's worth. But, 'general financial reading' is pretty useless in my opinion. Even the best of forecasters get it wrong TOO often to be worth reading.
Market Forecasts Prove Worthless
If you look through the article, it basically goes through the
"financial expert predictions for 2012" written in 2011. The article shows us what was predicted to happen this year versus what
actually happened this year. If you listened to the financial advice to the T based on some prominent financial paper that you read, it would have been
extremely harmful to your portfolio.
A quick example. Last year, there was a huge buzz around 'international funds' being the best investment, my financial adviser was telling me that these are the top picks for the coming year (back a year ago- thankfully I didn't listen). The article shows that a +10% growth was predicted, but, now that we can look back over the history of the year, we see the actual growth was -16%!
In the end, if the experts can't predict what the whole market as a big general picture will look like in a year, I don't think predictions on specific companies would be much better (i.e. recall the prediction of apple being the first trillion dollar company by August 2013 ~ or something ridiculous).
Disclaimer, my portfolio is now composed of a modified couch potato.