Mario Draghi may need to get a bigger (QE) boat

If Mario Draghi wants to have a significant market impact after Thursday's European Central Bank meeting, he better not think small.

The financial world's collective gaze will be focused on the ECB president after the session, during which policymakers are expected to launch a U.S.-style quantitative easing program aimed at injecting liquidity into the sputtering euro zone economy, and goosing asset prices in the process.

History, at least that generated by the Federal Reserve's historically ambitious three rounds of QE, would suggest that the initiative would boost stocks, commodities and bond yields and, hopefully, generate some real economic growth.

Moec figures the program will entail government bond buying of between 500 billion and 700 billion euros ($580 billion and $810 billion) over the span of 18 months, a close-to-consensus expectation that likely already is priced in.

When headlines leaked of what the ECB was considering, the euro briefly sold, then rebounded and eventually settled slightly higher against the dollar. The trading action was an indication of "how baked-in expectations are to current market prices," said Christopher Vecchio, currency analyst at DailyFX.

In total, QE in Europe, whatever its size, may get more credit than it deserves for what Bespoke Investment Group projects will be a strong year for euro zone equities.

In fact, Bespoke's Paul Hickey argued in an analysis that one of the big contrarian plays for the year will be European stocks outperforming their U.S. counterparts. That's been the trend so far in 2015, and he expects it to continue.