Forecasting the market is hard, some would say impossible. But that doesn’t keep Wall Street’s best and brightest from diving in to the fray, year after year. Rarely have their predictive energies been on greater display than this week, when Goldman Sachs warned that annual S&P 500 returns may narrow to a paltry 3% over the next decade, only for JPMorgan Asset Management to say the view is too dour.
Why is it so hard to see the future of stocks and bonds? The main reason is the role of big, calamitous events in shaping their destiny. Things come out of nowhere — a pandemic, wars, oil embargoes – and predictions premised on business as usual are often torn up.
