Ignore All 2021 Market Predictions - Except This One
If 2020 proved anything it's that any forecast beyond one or two months is likely to be upended by unforeseen events.
Wall Street forecasts often miss their mark.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
As long as Wall Street has been in existence, it has been a tradition around this time of year for market participants to make predictions about what might happen to stock prices, interest rates, commodities and exchange rates in the following 12 months. These predictions garner a lot of attention, as they are made by very smart people with access to the best data and vast resources at their disposal. And yet, far more often than not these predictions end up being hilariously wrong.
If anything, 2020 should have proven once and for all the futility of trying to make accurate market predictions. Coming into this year, nobody said a killer virus would emerge that plunge the global economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression, leading to one of the biggest stock market crashes in history and the price of oil tumbling to be below zero dollars a barrel, only to be followed by one of the fastest economic and market recoveries in history. Yet, a strategist who predicted the S&P 500 Index would be up more than 15% in 2020 would have been proven right - but for the wrong reasons.