“David Kostin would’ve raised his year-end target by now.”

That was among the dozens of random thoughts orbiting my runner’s void on Wednesday morning — an electron competing for space in one of the shells around the cozy, thoughtless vacuum my mind escapes to by mile number three.

The fleeting notion came with an addendum. “Maybe,” I thought on, “Snider’s gun-shy, this being his first year in the big seat.”

Then the thought passed, supplanted by something else random. Or, now that I think about it, randomly associated: “I bet that Kosterina blueberry vinegar would make a killer reduction with those mission figs — do I have any honey?” The brain’s a funny thing. (Kostin, Kosterina.)

I finished up my jog, fixed myself a(nother) coffee, set an iPhone alarm for 4:45 labeled “buy honey!” and checked my e-mail. Wouldn’t you know it: “Continued earnings growth should drive continued equity market upside,” Ben Snider wrote, in a note dated yesterday evening. “We expect the S&P 500 will rise by 6% to our revised year-end target of 8000.”

There’s the chart. Snider now expects 24% EPS growth in 2026, 8ppt better than the pace seen by his peers (i.e., much quicker than the median top-down chief equity strategist expects) but roughly on par with bottom-up consensus.

With (nearly) everyone on the books, Q1 earnings season in the US was nothing short of a barnburner. Overall index EPS growth was a ridiculous 26% YoY.

As the figure below shows, even if you strip out the Anthropic write-up (that’s the Amazon and Alphabet “other income” caveat), profits grew 18% last quarter.

The picture’s only marginally less rosy if you strip out the fillip from mega-cap tech altogether. Note the grey diamonds in the chart: The median S&P 500 company managed to grow earnings by 14% last quarter.

That latter figure — 14% EPS growth for the typical large-cap company — counted as the best result in at least 10 years if you exclude the impact of the first Trump tax cuts and the rebound from COVID, when corporate America was lapping easy comps aided and abetted by “stimmy.”

As hard as this is to take for bears and those inclined to perpetual skepticism (and I’m both on occasion), the rally’s not valuation-driven. In fact, it’s all earnings. Or all projected earnings.

“YTD, the increase in consensus forward EPS estimates has outpaced the S&P 500 price gain, resulting in a decline in the P/E multiple,” Snider went on, noting that if you look back to 2024, “near-term earnings growth has arithmetically accounted for the entire 40% rise in the S&P.”

And thank God for that. Because as Snider also remarked, the index multiple “remains very elevated relative to history, as does the degree of equity market concentration.” Goldman expects the overall market multiple to remain roughly flat at ~21x through year-end.

If you’re curious as to what share of earnings growth this year will be attributable to AI infrastructure investment, Snider’s answer is “roughly half.”

Now do yourself a favor: Order some of that Kosterina crushed blueberry vinegar I mentioned above. It’ll change your life.