Stocks: "Anyone who thinks they'll get more than 10% this year is smoking dope"

"I'm buying electric utilities, and I'm looking at one of the large money-center banks that's selling at half the valuation of its competitors," says Robert Costello, longtime Philadelphia-area stock watcher and boss at $80 million-asset Costello Asset Management, about what he thinks will make his clients a little richer, after listening to New York stock-picker Bob Doll and other relentless optimists at the Chartered Financial Analysts of Philadelphia's 10th annual prognosticators' dinner last night.

So he's not expecting a repeat of last year's 31% rise in the S&P 500? "You did well if you were in Gilead and select pharmaceuticals, Norfolk Southern and some of the railroads, Boeing and a lot of the cyclical transportation stocks, a lot of the banks that were up from very depressed valuations," Costello recalls fondly. (He says his own clients added a third to their portfolios and kept a lot of that invested.)

"But you can't buy yesterday's news," he concluded. "Anyone who thinks they'll get more than 10 percent this year is smoking dope."