8 stock market stats I'm thinking about as we enter a new year 📋
The stock market usually goes up, but returns will vary greatly 📊
For long-term investors in the stock market, the starts and ends of years don’t mean too much.
Still, it’s easy to get drawn into and even swayed by discussions about what could happen in the markets in the near-term.
That’s why TKer likes to provide subscribers with as much context as possible when it comes to topics like one-year price targets on the stock market. (More here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
Last Tuesday, Josh Brown and Michael Batnick invited me onto What Are Your Thoughts? to discuss the 2026 Wall Street targets.
Here are some stats we discussed, and a couple more that you might find helpful:
Strategists’ targets tend to be average and also way off: Bespoke Investment Group found that since 2000, the average Wall Street strategist’s year-end price target implied an 8.9% annual return. And on average, these targets missed the mark by 14.1 percentage points.
Average returns are extremely rare: Carson Group’s Ryan Detrick observed that since 1950, the S&P 500 booked an 8% to 10% return just four times.
The range of normal returns is wide: DataTrek Research co-founder Nicholas Colas found that while the S&P 500’s average total return since 1928 is 11.8%, the standard deviation around that mean is 19.5 percentage points. That is to say that any one-year total return between -7.7% and +31.3% would be “consistent with historical norms.”
Up years tend to be strong: Ritholtz Wealth Management’s Ben Carlson observed that since 1928, the S&P 500 gained 21% in the average positive year. In other words, when the annual return is positive, it tends to be very positive. On the flip side, the S&P fell 13% in the average down year.
The stock market usually goes up: JPMorgan Asset Management analysts noted that while the S&P’s average intra-year max drawdown since 1980 is 14.1%, the annual returns were ultimately positive in 34 of those 45 years, or 75% of the time. Similarly, Creative Planning’s Charlie Bilello had observed that on any given day since 1928, the odds of a positive total return in one year was 75%.
Earnings forecasts can be pretty accurate: FactSet analysts found that since 2000 (excluding 2001, 2008, 2009, and 2020, which are arguably outlier years), the average difference between the initial annual EPS estimate at the beginning of the year and the reported EPS was just 0.9%.
We covered much more on What Are Your Thoughts? to discuss the 2026 Wall Street targets. Check it out on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.