Every December, Wall Street's strategists publish where the S&P 500 will end the following year. The press prints the table; by the next December nobody remembers who said what. This ledger keeps score. Every target is a dated, attributed, source-linked number, graded against the index's actual year-end close — never a model, never an opinion. The roll-up is a per-firm record built the way QuantLogix grades its own calls: the headline is average miss, never a hit rate; thin records shrink toward the field rather than reading as false precision; a firm ranks only after 2 graded years. Alongside it: each firm's bias (do the misses run one way), whether revising mid-year ever helped, and — for the year still open — how far the index must travel from here for each call to be right.
Firms ranked by shrunk average miss — each firm's mean absolute error pulled toward the field's own average over two phantom years, so one lucky year cannot top the board. A firm below 2 graded years shows as accruing, never scored.
| Firm | Graded | Avg miss | Bias | Direction | Best · worst year | Revisions | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Each December's field of opening calls against what the index actually did. Consensus miss is the median target against the close; field miss is the average of every firm's absolute error.
| Year | Firms | Median target | Range | Implied | Actual close | Actual return | Consensus miss | Field miss | Direction right | Best · worst |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Every target behind the board — the number, when and where it was published, and the close it graded against. Grades judge the number as published, never the thesis behind it. Revisions are labelled and never score the firm.
| Year | Firm | Target | Published | Actual · live | Error · distance | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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A target needs a firm, a target year, a level, the date it was published and a working source. A range enters at its midpoint and is labelled. A number published after the year closed is a recollection, not a forecast — it never enters.
Every grade is the published level against the index's actual year-end close, and every close carries its own source. Error is signed — positive is too bullish. No model, no judgment call, no AI anywhere in a grade.
The number published before the year began is what scores. Mid-year revisions are graded and shown, and judged only on whether the change landed closer to the close — helped, hurt, or a round trip.
The headline is mean absolute error, shrunk toward the field over two phantom years. Bias reads only when the misses run one way. A firm ranks only after two graded years; thinner records accrue.
QL Strategist Ledger is diagnostic research about published forecasts, not investment advice. Year-end targets are firms' published base cases; this ledger grades the number as published against the index's sourced year-end close, never the research behind it. Coverage follows the firms the press records each December. Sources are linked on every row and every close. Past accuracy does not predict future accuracy.
Every Wall Street year-end S&P 500 target — dated, attributed, source-linked — graded against the index's actual year-end close. It shows the Street's consensus miss by year, each firm's average miss and bias, whether mid-year revisions helped, and how far the open year's targets sit from the live index.
Deterministically: the published number against the sourced year-end close. Error is signed (positive means too bullish), direction is judged against the prior year's close, and an unclosed year stays open — it is never scored early and never modelled.
The call that counts is the one made before the year began. Revisions are graded and shown, and judged separately on whether the change landed closer to the close — helped, hurt, or a round trip back to the opening number.