To be honest, I don’t love the setup for US equities in 2026.

And yes, my trepidation was reinforced on Monday morning by Bloomberg’s feature piece documenting Wall Street’s uniformly bullish view for stocks in the new year.

Let me state the obvious up front, lest anyone should get the wrong idea: Wall Street’s almost always uniformly bullish, it’s just a matter of how strictly we can interpret the word “uniformly.”

In this context (i.e., for 2026), “uniformly” means exactly that. No one expects a decline. Or no one Bloomberg deems important enough to include in their survey of seers.

On average, people who get paid four, five and six or more times the median national income to predict where a benchmark index of blue-chip corporate equities will end up 12 months hence see a 9% advance for the S&P. If that pans out, it’d mark the first instance of four straight annual gains since the dot-com frenzy, which is to say since the last tech bubble.

I’m the first person to remind market participants that stocks typically go up, and that the game’s rigged at every turn to facilitate gains. Indeed, rising stocks are an existential imperative for an economy in thrall to consumerism and increasingly dependent on discretionary spending by the wealthy (or at least the well-to-do) whose profligacy ebbs and flows with the value of their assets.

The chart above’s familiar. It shows the quarter-by-quarter change in the value of household equity holdings (blue bars) along with the cumulative gain since the original pandemic drawdown. From Q2 of 2020 through Q2 of this year, that windfall exceeded $30 trillion.

As a quick aside, one popular strategist continues to push the idea that stock participation’s broadening out to include lower-income Americans, the implication being that the associated wealth increase can bolster spending in the bottom leg of the “K-shaped” economy.

That thesis relies almost entirely on a contextless chart depicting an ostensible explosion in the “wealth” of the bottom 50%. I spent some time dispensing with that canard in October, so I won’t recapitulate other than to show you the chart again.

Suffice to say the bottom 50%’s stock windfall is RELATIVE! (If you’ll pardon the Trumpian style choice.)

With that out of the way, it’s important for the economy that stocks keep going up because again, the well-to-do absolutely spend more when the value of their portfolios and 401(k)s is on an upward trajectory.

It’s not one-to-one, of course, particularly not on the way up (you’re not going to buy a new car for every $50,000 in paper wealth your VOO mints), but there’s a correlation and it’s much stronger on the way down. In other words: If stocks were to suffer a meaningful and sustainable decline, spending among the “merely rich” would absolutely falter and with it, the broader economy.

So you can be sure the Trump administration will do everything in its power to keep stocks buoyant, but they come into the new year priced to perfection. And earnings expectations don’t admit of much room for error.

As the figure above, from Goldman, shows, bottom-up and top-down consensus for 2026 EPS growth are 15% and 14%, respectively. The S&P’s forward multiple is 22x, 88%ile on a 30-year lookback.

If anything goes materially wrong with consensus forward earnings expectations, that multiple’s going to be 100%ile. Or actually not, because as soon as the market gets a whiff of trouble, stocks will de-rate preemptively to account for a possible disappointment.

The fact that not a single professional top-down forecaster — and note that Bloomberg’s survey includes not only the biggest banks, but also boutique firms — is out on a limb suggesting stocks might post a decline after rising 24%, 23% and 17% in 2023, 2024 and 2025 (more on a total return basis) is a contrarian indicator, and a rather simple-to-grasp one at that.

Of course, there’s considerable career risk in projecting an annual loss for US equities. In short: You better be right if you’re going to be out on that historically shaky limb, and you won’t generally have the leeway to wait around in the event things don’t develop bearishly during the first half of the year.

There are two pillars supporting the US economy: The above-mentioned high-income spending and AI capex. If stocks falter, the spending impulse will too, and if Oracle’s any indication (it may not be), obtaining financing for data center buildouts will be more difficult going forward, notwithstanding the fortress balance sheets of non-Oracle hyper-scalers.

Bottom line, the odds of the S&P being lower this time next year are about as good as the odds that it’s higher, in my view. Not an especially bold call, I realize, but if I were a top-down strategist on Wall Street, my career clock would be ticking.