Wall Street’s 2024 faceplant: The year all its predictions got smoked 

Wall Street’s crystal ball missed the mark in 2024 from the get-go.  

While you were still sending those “Happy New Year 🎉” emails earlier this year, the market had already left Wall Street’s targets in the dust. By mid-January, the S&P 500 had surged past analysts’ end-of-year targets — an embarrassment only matched by their confidence. 

Getting it wrong is one thing. The strategists also forecast a modest 2% gain for the year.  

What did the S&P 500 deliver? The index obliterated forecasts, notching a jaw-dropping 27% gain against that lukewarm prediction. 

Take JPMorgan. The world’s biggest bank kicked off 2024 with a timid 4,200-point target, more than 40% below where the S&P actually landed.  

MONIIFY reached out to the big firms for comments, but all we got were out-of-office replies. 

It wasn’t just JPMorgan — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and UBS all missed the memo. Their forecasts ranged from 4,200 to 5,400, miles short of the 6,000-point milestone the market smashed through.  

The average 2024 projection from these titans? 4,866 — a whopping 22% miss. Of course, most of them updated it over the course of the year.  

“Wall Street’s miss in predicting the S&P 500’s performance in 2024 shows how unpredictable the market can be,” Arun Leslie John, chief market analyst at Century Financial, tells MONIIFY.

Risk redux? 

And it might happen again — the top seven to 10 stocks dominate the index, raising the risk that markets could once again drift away from underlying economic reality in the year ahead, John says. 

To be fair, forecasting isn’t a walk in the park.  

Setting targets means considering lots of variables like interest rates, inflation, economic growth, corporate growth and so on. “Some people tend to take forecasting like set in stone, but it is not,” says Stephane Ekolo, a global equity strategist at TFS Derivatives.  

Forecasting is more of a work in progress, as it’s revised over the year, he tells MONIIFY.  

But let’s be real — this isn’t a one-off. Wall Street’s track record for getting it wrong is legendary. 

Not their first rodeo 

Flashback to 2022 — inflation soared while the Federal Reserve slashed rates post-Covid, but Jerome Powell, Janet Yellen, and Joe Biden insisted it was “transitory.”  

Wall Street, meanwhile, expected modest rate hikes and a rally. JP Morgan called for 5,050, Goldman Sachs said 5,100, Bank of America aimed at 4,600, and Morgan Stanley was at 4,400. Spoiler alert — they were way off. 

The S&P 500 ended the year near 3,839 points, down 19.4%. Yikes. 

They were caught off guard then by the Fed hiking rates fast and the China slowdown. Fast-forward to 2024, and Wall Street was blindsided by the AI boom, Mohamed Hashad, chief market strategist at Noor Capital, tells MONIIFY. Indeed, Nvidia’s monster rally powered much of the S&P’s growth, a phenomenon few strategists saw coming.

What’s on deck for 2025? 

For 2025, most big banks are playing it safe, projecting gains of 7% to 15% for the S&P 500 from current levels. 

We recently polled 17 market pros — strategists, traders, investors and fund managers — and 53% saw stocks ending the year near the bottom of that range, climbing 7.4% to 6,500 points. Not bad, but nothing close to the stellar >20% runs we saw this year and last.  

Then there’s the wild-card bunch: 30% of those polled think the S&P could stall or even slip back to 6,000. 

Will 2025 be another humbling year for Wall Street — or will they finally get it right? 

Edited by Ankush Chibber and Azar Zaidi. If you have any tips, ideas or feedback, please get in touch: talk-to-us@moniify.com