There was another bizarre aspect to 2019: it was a year when despite the blockbuster overall return of the S&P, "bullish" strategies actually underperformed.

Now, in his year in review weekly, Goldman's David Kostin makes some observations of his own, and reaches a similar conclusion to that from Morgan Stanley.

For one the S&P 500, which soared started in early October, just around the time the Fed launched QE4, reached 35 new all-time highs last year, with 20 of those days coming in the last two months. US equities also bested other major global markets, outperforming Japan (15%), Europe (23%), and emerging markets (15%).

So far so good, yet what is more notable is how the market reached its impressive returns, and here Goldman confirms what we already knew, namely that valuation expansion drove nearly all of the S&P 500 return in 2019. To wit, according to Goldman earnings growth explains just 8% of the S&P 500 return last year (others disagree, and Morgan Stanley for example observes that earnings were actually negative in 2019 meaning earnings growth subtracted from total returns).