My inbox spills over around this time each year with outrageous analyst recommendations, “Hot Stock Tips!” and “Top 10 Investments for 2009.” The herd instincts among these market prophets make sheep look like independent thinkers. As a response, I have this little tradition each New Year’s where I make my own gambles on the direction the world will take.

Last January, I bet my colleague £200 that the Dow would fall lower than 11,000 by the end of the year (It was at 13,000 last January) and that Obama would win the U.S. election. So with my two horses coming in first, apparently I should be feeling pretty good about my womanly instincts at this stage. Curiously, I’m not.

We’ve kissed goodbye to a year no one in the City will ever forget. Businesses all around the world are shutting down. People are losing their jobs. Banks are repossessing houses. Prices are being cut. As our ephemeral wealth vaporizes, my instincts are not telling me to take another gamble, but not to push my luck.

Prognosticating City bankers like myself are afraid to look into our crystal balls because if it reveals any more bits of bad news on the horizon, then ignorance is bliss. Most of us grew up in an era where stocks “would always go up” in the long run, where houses would too, where jobs were always available, … and oh yes, credit.

So when I wasn’t only correct about the DOW’s negative directional spin last year but overshot it by about 3,000 points, I’m now wishing my psychic powers could morph into market-boosting ones. In other words, it’s only fun to be right about your “end of the world” predictions when that world’s not yours.

I’m worried that our options are exhausted. If the City’s “Plan A” is now officially defunct, where we ride off into the sunset on the profiteering market Bull, then we must currently be on “Plan B” where those Bulls have stopped dead in their tracks, snorting and spitting, surviving on taxpayer handouts. But my greatest fear (which I refuse to gamble on) for 2009 is that things may just get so desperate, we will be forced to turn to “Plan C” – we eat the Bulls.

An ancient Chinese proverb once stated that, “Those who have knowledge don’t predict. Those who predict don’t have knowledge.” So what does the future hold for the City in 2009? I wouldn’t want to guess. But as for last year’s £200, it’s going under the mattress.