USAToday summarizes how a dozen of Wall Street's top strategists look for stocks, interest rates and corporate earnings. Below is the prediction for S&P 500 target for 2004 year end. The entire forecast can be found in this table.
Strategist |
Firm |
2004 S&P target |
Change from 2003 |
Edward Yardeni |
Prudential |
1300 |
16.9% |
Abby Joseph Cohen |
Goldman Sachs |
1250 |
12.4% |
Brian Belski |
Piper Jaffray |
1200 |
7.9% |
Stuart Freeman |
A.G. Edwards |
1180 |
6.1% |
Thomas McManus |
Banc of America |
1160 |
4.3% |
Chip Dickson |
Lehman Bros. |
1150 |
3.4% |
Gary Gordon |
UBS |
1150 |
3.4% |
Hugh Johnson |
First Albany |
1150 |
3.4% |
Steve Galbraith |
Morgan Stanley |
1125 |
1.2% |
Abhijit Chakrabortti |
J.P. Morgan |
1120 |
0.7% |
Tobias Levkovich |
Smith Barney |
1025 |
-7.8% |
Richard Bernstein |
Merrill Lynch |
890 |
-20.0% |
Conspicuously, in the verbatims almost everyone accepted that the first half of 2004 will be good for investors. The lessons from the pass few years is when most people only look in one direction, the turning point is almost always around the corner. How soon will the market turn south this time?
(BusinessWeek has a more complete list of predictions from 66 pros here.)