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Wall Street’s stock market predictions for 2025 are coming in, and two calls in particular stand out in our rankings.
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 Bank of America team.
On the one hand, these numbers seem ridiculous, indicating impossible precision in stock market forecasts (obviously!).
But in places like our Chart of the Week, the leaderboard of projections from the strategists we follow, these numbers convey something vital about the oft-misunderstood shots Wall Street likes to call.
At RBC, Lori Calvasina and her team wrote that their end goal of 6,600 by 2025 “should be seen as a compass and not a GPS.” The end result is simply “a construct that helps explain whether we believe stocks will rise and why.”
These companies hope that customers – who pay for Calvasina’s research and ideas – will read the entire PDF. But in many cases the figure is quickly uprooted from its place of origin and ends up in places like our Chart of the Week or mentioned in conversations.
But while 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 even humor). A reminder that there is more happening here.
In a sense, these numbers tell you how to interpret them: as a base case, as a guideline, as a range, as an expression of a best guess. Even if ending in a zero – or usually two – is the generally accepted scientific way to demonstrate increased uncertainty.
And to be fair to Wells and BofA, there is a real reason behind the numbers.
“In the simplest terms, passing the market’s current 22x 2025E EPS valuation into 2026E suggests that a year from now, SPX would be around 7,000 ($318.50 EPS @ 22x = 7007),” Wells’ team wrote.
But they left that extra “7” to lighten things up a bit. Or, as they put it, “for lucky palindrome and James Bond lovers.”
At BofA, Savita Subramanian and co. noted a reference to the stock market’s post-crisis bottom – 666 – calling for a full 6,000-point rally to be realized sixteen years later.
These ‘nice’ projections, we notice, have a precedent.
In 2014, BTIG’s Dan Greenhaus used a Britney Spears song to explain his views on the stock market in 2015. That same year, Oppenheimer’s John Stoltzfus called for the S&P 500 to end at 2,311, a prime number, although he played it fair.
