I’ve said this probably more times than I need to by now, but I’ll say it again anyway: 12-month price targets for equity benchmarks (and really just 12-month targets in general, whether it’s for equities, rates, credit or anything else) are of little use, if they’re of any use at all. Cue a caustic Charlie Munger quotable.

There was a time ca. 2017/2018 when I dedicated huge amounts of digital space to documenting the “key” takeaways from Wall Street’s year-ahead outlook pieces which inundate inboxes beginning in mid-November and continuing well into December.

As the years went on, I dialed that back because… well, because I got tired of implicitly suggesting to readers something that wasn’t true, namely that those outlooks are worth reading. That’s not meant to disparage anyone, it’s just to say that in any given year, any damn (or, more aptly given the cruel nature of the world, damned) thing can happen, and when damn(ed) things do happen, rendering price targets, forecasts and trade recommendations unlikely to work, those targets, forecasts and recos are revised or dropped altogether.

It’s just a rolling mark-to-market exercise, and I’m not entirely sure it serves a purpose. I’m absolutely sure it doesn’t serve a purpose high enough to justify the combined salaries of the teams engaged in that exercise. The disparity between the pay such a team receives, inclusive of bonuses, and the combined annual pay for a pod of middle school teachers (whose bonus pool is just five $20 Staples gift cards and a buy-one, get-one coupon for Applebee’s) is too wide, and unjustifiable from a societal value-add perspective.

Anyway, if you’re interested, JPMorgan finally raised their S&P target. Recall that it was glued to 4,200 during the Marko era. Now, post-Marko, Dubravko Lakos-Bujas sees the index rising to 6,500, just like everyone else. He expects aggregate index earnings of $270, for double-digit profit growth.

Bloomberg unironically wrote that Lakos-Bujas’s “capitulation” to the bull camp “comes after [the] departure of celebrity strategist Marko Kolanovic earlier this year.” Who was it, I wonder, that celebritized Marko? There was a blog involved in the early stages, but he became a household name (not like George Clooney, but you know I mean) thanks to CNBC and — wait for it — Bloomberg, which published at least a couple of obsequious profile pieces over the years. That’s the paparazzi press for you: Build you up to tear you down. The saving grace for Marko is that his severance package was probably large enough to buy out the entire Bloomberg Markets team’s payroll.

Anyway, Lakos-Bujas’s back on the consensus train. 2025 will be a year defined by “higher dispersion across stocks, styles, sectors, countries and themes” he said, adding that a lot could go wrong from inflation to geopolitics, but ultimately, the “opportunities are likely to outweigh risks” in stocks, as long as market participants maintain a “flexible approach to investing.”

Meanwhile, over at BofA, Michael Hartnett apparently convinced Savita Subramanian to go along with his quadruple sixes joke, which he thinks is a lot funnier and more clever than it actually is. By way of context, ol’ Mike wrote the following early last month:

A bull market that began at 666 in March 2009 ending with a blowoff top to 6666… just feels so right.

Doesn’t get much better than that, folks. Seriously, it doesn’t. That’s what counts as creative writing on the sell-side.

Subramanian’s a little — and Savita, do feel free to reach out and correct me if I’m wrong on this — more serious than Hartnett, both in terms of analysis and in a kind of general sense of the word “serious,” which is why I was surprised that Mike convinced her to adopt a joke as BofA’s house S&P call.

By “joke” I don’t mean SPX 6666 isn’t achievable (it’s eminently achievable; hell we could be there by March), I mean it was a joke in the literal sense of the word. Hartnett’s 6666 remark was just him musing about the market zeitgeist as he does every week in his exceedingly popular “Flow Show” series. Now, that joke is Subramanian’s official target.

She sees aggregate index earnings of $275 which, in a testament to the groupthink that Kolanovic was determined to buck, is bang on consensus. As in: Subramanian’s EPS “estimate” matches consensus exactly, to the dollar.

Like Lakos-Bujas and all the rest of the herd, Subramanian expects dispersion. Investors should “buy stocks, not the index.” BofA’s overweight financials, consumer discretionary, materials, real estate and utilities. JPMorgan’s also overweight financials and utilities, but Lakos-Bujas is underweight consumer discretionary.

Subramanian painted a binary picture around Donald Trump’s second coming. “Trump 2.0 is cast as remarkably bullish (strong upcycle + de-regulation = boom) or very negative (fiscal profligacy, global uncertainty = stagflation),” she said.

Now do yourself a favor: Ignore all of that, buy SPY and check your account in 10 years. Odds are, you’ll outperform every, single Wall Street equity strategy team’s recommendations, and the vast majority of hedge funds and active managers besides. Cue another Charlie Munger quotable.