The easy days of taking a bullish position on stocks as a whole and watching them soar has come to an end. So warns investing strategist and currency trader Boris Schlossberg of BK Asset Management.
With the roughly flat for 2015, "It may be that the "index bubble" is finally starting to burst and stock pickers will rule the day once again," Schlossberg said Tuesday.
"Everybody is just so absolutely certain that the only way to go is through index investing that we may just be getting a blowback," he said on CNBC's "Trading Nation." Meanwhile, "stock pickers are so beaten and battered by the market."
After six incredible years for stocks, Schossberg predicts that "you're going to see these averages actually be very average through next year."
For instance, Schlossberg looks back to the long period from 1966 to 1980, when the Dow Jones industrial average was flat, making it "a stock pickers' market all the way through."
Meanwhile, as stocks have been flat in 2015, correlations among stocks have fallen, presenting an opportunity for those who choose given stocks over others.
"If current trends continue, look for 2016 to be a good year for active management as correlations continue to decline," Nicholas Colas of Convergex wrote in a Tuesday note to clients. "These managers have been stuck between a rock and a hard place for the better part of a decade, but they should be on more solid footing going forward."
Meanwhile, over the past six years, the popular SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) has nearly doubled.
