Year to Forget for S&P 500 Strategists Who Missed by 400 Points
- Things turned ugly in October amid mounting recession fears
- Strateigsts unbowed by lapse hold best year-ahead outlook
This article is for subscribers only.
When you predict the same thing will happen to the stock market year after year, eventually you’re going to be wrong.
That’s what happened to Wall Street strategists in 2018, whose perennial optimism about U.S. equities got bushwhacked by the worst fourth quarter in a decade. In January, the group predicted the S&P 500 would end 2018 at 2,893, on average, translating to an 8 percent gain. Instead, the benchmark index dropped 6 percent to finish just above 2,500. The almost 400-point gap is the biggest since the 2008 financial crisis.