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Strategies
Optimistic guesses about the future are not forecasts, our columnist says.
Dec. 20, 2024, 9:00 a.m. ET
An annual ritual is underway at the major Wall Street investment houses: predicting exactly where the S&P 500 will finish the next calendar year.
This mission is impossible — but that hasn’t stopped teams of well-trained strategists at august brokerages and investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley from focusing their analytical firepower on forecasting the future.
How wrong can these guesses be? Paul Hickey, a founder of Bespoke Investment Group, compared the yearly Wall Street predictions and actual market results starting with the forecast for Dec. 31, 2000.
He found that the Wall Street consensus only ever predicted gains, every single year, of about 8.8 percent on average. Of course, there were big losses in some years, as well as larger-than-expected rallies in others, so the variance between actual annual performance and the prediction was huge — an average gap of 14.2 percentage points.
Being wrong by that much means that these forecasts weren’t merely inaccurate. They were completely out of bounds.
The amazing thing, with a record like this, is that the strategists keep trying. I salute them for having the supreme self-confidence to stick with it.
