Review Finds Most Market Forecast Misses Omitted Key Events

A review of 135 market and political-risk calls found that omissions drove most misses, highlighting how often forecasters failed to identify the events that later moved markets.

Erika Mouynes’s review counted 81 calls as misses: 73 omitted the event that later moved markets, while eight made wrong calls. One call received full credit.

The main sample includes 135 calls from 15 institutions, with 45 calls for each of the 2024, 2025 and first-half 2026 forecast cycles. Twenty-one calls named an event that later moved markets, about 16% of the total. Three described how an event could affect a portfolio.

Those counts measure different things. A call could name an event without explaining how it might affect a portfolio. The review’s separate scoring rubric looked for an actor, a mechanism, a direction and a time window to assess how specific and actionable each call was.

The calls received 13.5 points out of 135 possible under that rubric, or 10%. A second coder reviewed the grading ledger. Agreement after adjudication was 87.1%, with 16 disagreements unresolved.

A separate review of Wall Street’s S&P 500 year-end targets found a median target of 4,825 ahead of 2022 and 4,000 ahead of 2023. The index’s price return was down 19.44% in 2022 and up 24.23% in 2023. Including dividends, returns were down 18.11% and up 26.44%, respectively.

The longer review periods cover different material from the 135-call sample. The bank target series spans 2021–2026, while reviews of public risk rankings from Eurasia Group and the World Economic Forum span 2016–2026.

Mouynes wrote: “The point is not to predict the event. It is to identify the signal that changes the odds.”