Well we made it. At the stroke of midnight on Friday morning we usher in a new year and pray for another year of relative equilibrium in what is, by any count, a late stage market. In 2015 the universal view was that we were in a the seventh inning of the current bull market cycle, so logic may have it that 2016 will serve-up a seventh inning stretch or moving into the eighth inning.

However, forgetting baseball analogies, one player in the market continues to be aggressive, and we expect will remain so this year. Chinese buyers—behemoths like Fosun Insurance Group—are snapping-up trophies such as New York's Waldorf-Astoria. But the more interesting aspect of Chinese investment in US real estate is the wealthy individual investors who are acquiring condominium projects, strip malls, airport hotels managing to circumvent Chinese government regulations for the export currency. Even further down the food chain are middle-class Chinese are acquiring individual homes and condo units across major US cities. The current level of Chinese investment has not been fueling the market, but this may change in 2016 as the stock market in China has settled down and will likely spawn more aggressive and broad gauged investment activity.

We'll see, but any way you look at it, 2016 promises to be an interesting year. As the late great Yogi Berra once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Happy New Year, and thanks for another year of reading the Executive Watch.