Below we highlight the year-end S&P 500 price targets of major Wall Street strategists polled each week by Bloomberg. Since we last updated our table, Credit Suisse, HSBC, and Morgan Stanley have increased their year-end targets. The average price target for all strategists currently sits at 1,050 for the S&P 500. This is 3.77% below the actual level of the index, so strategists as a whole aren't bullish for the remainder of the year.
What's ironic about the current average price target is that it is right at the level it was at to start the year! As shown below, at the start of 2009, strategists had a target of 1,049.9 for the S&P 500, which would have been a gain of 16.2%. Throughout the first two quarters of the year, however, strategists lowered their estimates as the market headed lower, and now they've had to raise their estimates as the market has rallied. Their low year-end price target was 944 on June 1st, so they continued to lower estimates well after the market had bottomed in March. Had they all just held tight, they would have been more spot on and not made themselves look bad in the process.
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