This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
Wall Street’s 2025 stock market forecasts are coming in, and two calls in particular stand out on our leaderboard.
In a sea of satisfying round numbers with lots of zeros, we have a 7,007 from Wells Fargo and a 6,666 call from the team at Bank of America.
On the one hand, these numbers seem ridiculous, suggesting impossible precision in stock market forecasts (of all things!).
But in places like our Chart of the Week, the leaderboard of projections from the strategists we track, these numbers convey something essential about the oft-misunderstood shots that Wall Street loves to call.
At RBC, Lori Calvasina and her team wrote that their 6,600 2025 year-end target “should be viewed as a compass as opposed to a GPS.” The end result is simply “a construct that helps to articulate whether we believe stocks will move higher and why.”
These firms hope that clients — who are paying for Calvasina’s research and ideas — are reading the whole PDF. But in many cases, the figure is quickly uprooted from its place of origin, ending up in places like our Chart of the Week or mentioned in conversation.
But whereas Calvasina’s nuance emerges in the discussion, Wells Fargo’s 7,007 and Bank of America’s 6,666 targets actually manage to convey some of this context in the absurdity of precision (and humor, even). A reminder that something more is happening here.
In a way, these numbers tell you how to interpret them: as a base case, guideline, a range, an expression of a best guess. Even if ending in a zero — or two, usually — is the generally accepted scientific way to show increased uncertainty.
And to be fair to Wells and BofA, there is a real rationale behind the numbers.
“In simplest terms, forwarding the market’s current 22x 2025E EPS valuation 2026E suggests that one year from now the SPX would be around 7,000 ($318.50 EPS @ 22x = 7007),” Wells’s team wrote.
But they did leave that extra “7” to make things just a little lighter. Or, as they put it, “for lucky palindrome & James Bond aficionados.”
At BofA, Savita Subramanian and co. noted a reference to the stock market’s post-crisis bottom — 666 — in calling for a full 6,000-point rally to be realized 16 years later.
These “fun” projections, we’d note, do have some precedent.
In 2014, BTIG’s Dan Greenhaus used a Britney Spears song in outlining his view for the stock market in 2015. That same year, Oppenheimer’s John Stoltzfus called for the S&P 500 to finish at 2,311, a prime number, though he played it straight.