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Wall Street’s 2025 stock market predictions are coming, 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 call from Wells Fargo and a 6,666 call from the Bank of America team.
On the one hand, these numbers seem ridiculous, suggesting impossible accuracy in stock market forecasts (of all things!).
But in places like our Weekly Chart, the leaderboard of strategist estimates we track, these numbers say something important about the often-misunderstood shots that Wall Street likes to call.
At RBC, Lori Calvasina and her team wrote that their 6,600 year-end 2025 goal “should be seen as a compass as opposed to a GPS.” The end result is simply “a construct that helps clarify whether we believe stocks will go higher and why.”
These firms hope that clients — who are paying for Calvasina’s research and ideas — are reading the entire PDF. But in many cases, the image is quickly uprooted from its original location, ending up in our weekly charts or places mentioned in the conversation.
But while Calvasina’s subtlety emerges in the discussion, Wells Fargo’s 7,007 and Bank of America’s 6,666 goals actually manage to convey some of this context in the absurdity of precision (and humor, too). A reminder that there is something else going on.
In a way, these numbers tell you how to interpret them: a base case, a guideline, a range, expressing a best guess. Even if it ends in a zero – or two, usually – is A generally accepted scientific method for showing increased uncertainty.
And to be fair to Wells and Boffa, there is There is a real logic behind the numbers.
“Simply put, the market’s current 22x 2025E EPS valuation forward to 2026E suggests the SPX will be around 7,000 ($318.50 EPS @ 22x = 7007) a year from now,” Wells’ team wrote.
But they left out that extra “7” to make things a little lighter. Or, as they say, “For fans of Lucky Palindrome and James Bond.”
At Bofa, Savita Subramanian and co. noted a quote calling for a full 6,000-point rally 16 years after the stock market’s post-crisis lows — 666.
These “fun” guesses, we will note, are some examples.
In 2014, Dan Greenhouse of BTIG called A Britney Spears’ song outlining her outlook for the stock market in 2015. In the same year, Oppenheimer’s John Stoltzfus calls for S&P 500 to end at 2,311A major number, though he played it straight.
