2025 Price Targets

‘Tis the season of forecasts. Between November and January the largest banks and asset managers start to publish their year ahead price targets for the S&P 500.

Largely, they tend to be wrong, with the standard deviation of over/underestimations being 15.86%, meaning that the actual year-end S&P 500 price outcomes tend to deviate significantly from the average strategist estimates.

But they do offer us a glimpse into how a large number of investors will be investing, directionally, in 2025. And that direction next year is up.

For 2025 here are the strategists and their year-end price targets (see chart above):

• UBS: $6,400
• Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan: $6,500
• CFRA: $6,585
• RBC, Barclays: $6,600
• Bank of America: $6,666
• BMO, HSBC: $6,700
• Deutsche Bank, Yardeni, Capital Economics: $7,000
• Wells Fargo: $7,007

And here is the 2025 return based on those price targets (assuming the year ended today):

• UBS: 5.09%
• Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan: 6.73%
• CFRA: 8.12%
• RBC, Barclays: 8.37%
• Bank of America: 9.45%
• BMO, HSBC: 10.01%
• Deutsche Bank, Yardeni, Capital Economics: 14.94%
• Wells Fargo: 15.05%

The average strategist forecast is 9.72% for 2025, which given how bearish strategists have been for the last couple of years is pretty great. But remember the standard deviation for these targets is 15.86%, which means the range of returns for 2025 could be anywhere between -6.14% and 25.58%.

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