What Wall St analysts expect for the S&P 500 in 2023? Should we care?(Daily 2-Min S&P 500 Commentary by Sidney Shauy)
How Wall Street analysts are seeing the market and projecting for 2023? Here’s a recent 2023 S&P 500 Price Target list posted by Seth Golden showing what 16 Wall Street firms are expecting. See chart (table) in the post image. To help you visualize it, I calculated the rates of return (to the right, in red) corresponding to each price target. As you can see, over half of the firms are expecting either zero return or a little devaluation of the index. (between zero and -8%). Less than half of the firms are expecting a positive return of the index (+1 to +15%).
As you can see, there’s no consensus. This is normal. Your rarely get a consensus. But what we can extract from this is information about the average magnitude of positives vs. negatives, number of positives vs. negatives, and the size of dispersion between the numbers. Without doing much math, just by pure observation, we notice a slightly negative bias to future expectations of return for the market, but the mean should lay somewhere near zero. In Dec. 1st’s post, we reached a similar conclusion with another unrelated study. It’s fair to say, that on average, investors are expecting not much an appreciation in the stock market for 2023.
But the important thing to keep in mind is that expectations change. And they change all the time. And that they can change dramatically and quickly. That’s why we don’t invest based on price targets or future projections of any kind. We measure risks and odds of profit vs loss every single day and make investing decisions accordingly once a day, every day.
Note: Above commentary is as of today but the Signal below is 3-day delayed. Daily LIVE SIGNALS are available to subscribers. If you wish to subscribe our LIVE signals, click here. Thank you!
