Wall St. Loves to Guess, but Nobody Knows What the Market Will Do in 2024 (2024)

Wall Street strategists are issuing forecasts for the performance of the stock market in 2024.

Pay them no mind.

The predictions are usually wrong, and when they’re right it’s only by accident.

Consider their prophecies for 2023. At the end of 2022, strategists predicted that the S&P 500 would end 2023 at 4,078, a gain of 6.2 percent from where it started, according to data from Bloomberg.

At the moment, the market is above 4,700, a gain of more than 22 percent. These forecasts were so deeply off the mark undoubtedly because 2022 was a truly terrible year for stocks — and also one that most analysts totally failed to foresee. So the predictions for 2023 were uncharacteristically modest, reflecting the gloom that prevailed when they were being set.

The median forecast on Dec. 19 called for the S&P 500 to close 2024 at 4,750, according to Bloomberg. The projections are still shifting — and will assuredly increase if the market keeps rising. When the market rises, the forecasts typically rise, too.

These forecasts aren’t scientific, and I only bother to address them at all because they get a tremendous amount of coverage, and they inform the advice given to thousands, and perhaps millions, of people.

If you find them entertaining or otherwise illuminating — wonderful. Enjoy them.

But at all costs, don’t take them at face value because there is no evidence that anyone can predict the market’s movements reliably, and a great deal of evidence that buying and selling stock on the basis of your views about the market’s impending movements is a fool’s game.