Wall Street strategists are abandoning their bullish views on the US stock market in droves as a sell-off in reaction to President Trump’s reciprocal tariff announcements has experts rapidly paring forecasts for 2025.
On Sunday night, Oppenheimer chief investment strategist John Stoltzfus became the latest strategist to cut his year-end S&P 500 target, lowering his forecast for the benchmark index to close this year at 5,950, down from 7,100. Stoltzfus had entered 2025 as the most bullish strategist on Wall Street.
“While our expectations are for cooler heads to prevail in the trade negotiation process that’s likely to follow last week’s tariff regime announcements the market’s reactions and percentage of recent declines in some individual stocks (as well as among major equity indices) suggests to us a need to right size expectations in the near term,” Stoltzfus wrote.
Oppenheimer’s call sees the firm join the likes of Goldman Sachs, RBC Capital Markets, Barclays, Evercore ISI, and Yardeni Research in lowering trimming their year-end S&P 500 forecast.
With futures tied to the major indexes pointing to a third day of sharp losses ahead of Monday’s market open, Stoltzfus noted that a “negative pitch book” has taken hold among investors.
That pitch book, Stoltzfus wrote, “seemingly projects negative outcomes to infinity.”
Julian Emanuel, who leads the equity, derivatives, and quantitative strategy team at Evercore ISI, lowered his year-end S&P 500 target to 5,600 from 6,800 over the weekend after the massive sell-off that has sent the benchmark index down more than 17% from its Feb. 19 record high.
Evercore is now one of three equity strategy teams tracked by Yahoo Finance that has flipped from seeing a positive return for the S&P 500 to projecting a negative year for stocks as Trump’s hefty tariffs ripple through the stock market. The S&P 500 finished 2024 at 5,881.
Policy uncertainty has already raised asset volatility, and Emanuel warns the impacts which have weighed on survey data like consumer confidence could trickle into other economic data points. This would result in either stagflation, where inflation increases and growth slows, or an “outright recession.”
“Investors, CEOs, and Consumers dislike uncertainty,” Emanuel wrote.
In a note early Friday morning before China’s reciprocal tariffs were announced, RBC Capital Markets head of US equity strategy Lori Calvasina lowered her year-end S&P 500 target to 5,550 from a prior target of 6,200.
