Exiting 2024, Deutsche Bank’s chief equity strategist Binky Chadha did what every (non) self-respecting sellside analyst does every November: he published a lengthy, repetitive report full of goalseeking charts which really did one thing: it applied a ruler to where the S&P had been in the past 12-18 months and extrapolated where the S&P would close the year (this extrapolation exercise - even though it may not be called that - it's an annual tradition among Wall Street strategists, one which inevitably wastes lots of vice presidents' and associates' time since it is virtually always wrong but bank clients have to see that their soft dollars end up encouraging their delusions, so everyone is bizarrely happy with the outcome).
What made Binky's forecast unique is that unlike his peers, he decided to position his extrapolating ruler in such a way that it showed the highest number among all his peers: indeed, his forecast that the S&P would close out 2025 at a price of 7,000, made quite a few headlines at the time (and making headlines is the only point of this insipid, shallow annual exercise in futility - it has nothing to do with being right or correctly predicting the future).
Well, this morning, Chadha finally capitulated and joined all of his fellow trend-following lemmings in slashing his S&P year-end price target by a whopping 12% to 6,150 from 7,000; In doing so, Wall Street's biggest permabull made even more headlines for having been the most wrong of all his peers. And he could be even more wrong: while his new target
still implies 14% upside, the DB strategist warned that a “credible relent” on trade policies is needed to get there.
