Expectations vs. Reality

Every year, strategists publish a year-end target for the S&P 500. How does that target compare to where the index actually finished, each year from 2000 to 2025.
Source: Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, CNNMoney, Barron's, CNBC, and Yahoo Finance strategist surveys
Avg. Absolute Miss
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Across all years in the dataset
Actual Beat Target
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of years
Direction of Bias
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Strategists tend to be systematically...

January consensus target vs. actual year-end close

Miss, by year (actual return − target-implied return)

Herd mentality: individual strategists' targets, by year

Each tile bins that year's individual named banks'/strategists' targets by implied return. Orange line marks realized return. Click to expand it into every firm's individual number, sorted smallest to largest implied return. Years without verifiable individual-firm breakdowns not shown here (see main table above for those years' consensus figures). 2026 is still in progress, so it shows the forecast cluster only, no outcome line yet.

How many standard deviations away was reality?

For years with more than 7 named firms. Measures the actual return against that year's own spread of individual forecasts (actual return − mean forecast)/standard deviation of forecasts. A miss ±2σ is the norm, while if forecasts behaved like a normal distribution, it'd be rare.

Full data

Year Prior Close Consensus Target Target Implied Return Actual Close Actual Return Miss (pts) Source

Every year by early January, major banks and independent strategists publish where they expect the S&P 500 to finish that calendar year. I compiled these into a consensus figure, an average or median across roughly 10-20 named strategists, plotted here as the "target." 

The pattern that shows up consistently is that for almost every year, strategists cluster their targets around a "normal" high-single-digit gain, while actual returns are far more volatile. Both to the upside (2019, 2021, 2023, 2024, all beat consensus by wide margins) and the downside (2018, 2022). 

Sources: BusinessWeek (via Seeking Alpha archive), CNNMoney/Yahoo Finance strategist roundups, Bloomberg surveys (via CNBC, Financial Samurai, globalmarketsinvestor.substack.com compilations, and 6meridian.com's Bloomberg-sourced retrospective chart), Barron's Big Money Poll. Actual year-end closes from public S&P 500 index data. Individual year sourcing varies since no single publisher has run a consistent annual survey across the full period. See the Source column in the table above.