"Start looking for trouble in the second half of 2018," Jeffrey Gundlach warns today. "I'm actually starting to think we'll see recession."

The DoubleLine [profile] chief and bond fund guru shared that tidbit and much more this afternoon in a packed-to-the-gills breakout session at the 2017 Schwab Impact conference at McCormick Place in Chicago.

Gundlach's session, officially called "Markets, Central Bank Policy and Your Portfolio" and titled "2017 at the Home Stretch" by Gundlach himself, covered a host of ground, in the U.S. markets and abroad. His recession worries come from multiple indicators, including the possible rebound of commodities prices, continued quantitative tightening by the Federal Reserve, the high valuation of the stock market and the high yield market, and more.

The good news, as Gundlach tells it, is that recession isn't coming immediately.

"Right now, there is very little evidence of a recession on the horizon. You never get a recession without leading indicators first going negative," Gundlach says. "The unfortunate bad news is that things can change very quickly," with the leading indicators only looking out three to six months into the future.

So what's a worried investor or tactical allocator to do if one buys Gundlach's prediction or fears he might be right? He likes mortgage-backed securities (over high yield, bank loans, and corporate credit), emerging market equities (over domestic equities), and commodities. Long-term, Gundlach sees big promise in India, which he predicts will see stocks there rise more than 1,000 percent in the coming decades.

Gundlach touched on a host of other topics, offering his takes on subjects like: bitcoin (which he calls "clearly not a currency"), the Federal Reserve (whose gurus Gundlach lost faith in "a long time ago"), and post-recession job growth (concentrated entirely in the 55+ age group). 

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