The stock market has been on a hot streak lately, notching record high after record high, and some bulls on Wall Street think the party isn’t over.
That marks a stunning reversal from the panic that gripped investors in April, when President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs shocked the world. Stocks, Treasury bonds, and the dollar crashed. Markets started pricing in a recession, and analysts slashed their forecasts.
Now that the fog of war is lifting, upbeat forecasts that predated Liberation Day are back, meaning stocks could put up big numbers again—as if the tariff shock from a few months ago was all just a bad dream.
On Monday, Oppenheimer chief investment strategist John Stoltzfus hiked his S&P 500 price target for this year to 7,100 from 5,950, reinstating the outlook he initially made in December 2024.
He cited progress on trade negotiations, strong corporate earnings, and the Federal Reserve’s deft handling of monetary policy, which cooled inflation without causing a recession.
If the S&P 500 hits 7,100 this year, it would represent a gain of about 21% for 2025, marking a third straight year with a surge of more than 20%. That hasn’t happened since the late 1990s, when the U.S. economy and the stock market boomed.
He cited strong earnings as well as AI adoption, the weak dollar, Trump’s tax cuts, pent-up demand, and expectations for Fed rate cuts in early 2026.
Last week, he reaffirmed it, predicting big tech companies will continue fueling the stock market’s rally despite Trump’s trade policies.
And over the longer term, this decade still looks like it will be another “roaring 20s,” according to market veteran Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research.
On Monday, he backed his thesis, which he first posited in August 2020, as productivity advances, a wave of capital outlays, and the endurance of consumer spending will keep stocks buoyant.
“If the remainder of the decade continues to play out as the Roaring 2020s, we predict that the S&P 500 will start the next decade at 10,000,” Yardeni wrote in a note.
