Bloomberg Pimco CEO Mohamed El-Erian

Pimco is offering up its investment themes for the next 3 to 5 years, a period in which its pros see central banks continuing with their experimental policies that have flooded the market with cash in recent years and powered stock markets.

Pimco expects more experiments over the next few years, as it predicts more central banks will follow the Fed’s lead in targeting growth and jobs more explicitly.

Among its pearls of wisdom:

“By all means, respect and benefit from the massive wave [central bank] have created and will continue to bolster. But also be mindful. It is already a very crowded wave and just small tweaks to accompanying “conventional wisdoms” can lead to major price adjustments (recall what has happened to gold in the last few weeks).”

A timely statement, given that investors have spent the last few days debating how serious the Fed is about an exit strategy. Read the latest words from the Fed here. Gold, for those who need a refresher, traded around $1,800 in October and is now just above $1,400 .

Along those lines:

“Resist the short-term focus of those financial pundits who have abandoned fundamentals in favor of just obsessing with what is cheaper only in relative terms. As an illustration in fixed income space, consider the absolute level of yields on highly risky sub-investment-grade bonds and ask yourself whether they bear any relation to the risk being underwritten. Yet some pundits are pushing them only on the basis that they are cheaper than investment grade bonds.”

In Europe, Pimco says, the collapse of the euro will remain conceivable, but not a dominant probability. (Read another view of why the euro is here to stay, despite the crisis )

But don’t forget the lessons of euro-zone rescues. Expect haircuts.

“You should expect future sovereign and corporate rescues to involve a growing set of bail-ins. Whether you call them haircuts or the more politically correct “PSI” (private sector involvement), a larger part of the capital structure is now vulnerable to capital losses.”

U.S. growth will be not much greater than 2%, but concerns about subpar growth will remain. Sustaining a surge in Japanese growth will be challenging. How other investors see the investing world in the shorter term.

Finally, don’t expect to make as much money in the future, they say. The point of all these central-bank experiments has been to move forward tomorrow’s growth and returns. That goes against New York Fed researchers, who see the S&P 500 scoring excess returns over the next five years.

Silvia Ascarelli

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