When it comes to projecting a year ahead for stocks, all the probabilities and most of the incentives rest with the bulls. The S & P 500 has been positive in three-quarters of all calendar years since 1958, when the index was created in its modern form. The market has gained at least 20% in more years (19) than it has fallen by any amount at all (17). On top of these favorable generic odds, current conditions are serving up few reasons to overthink the default stance of bland bullishness. A bull market has been underway for 38 months and the uptrend prevails; consensus earnings forecasts promise a double-digit rise next year; and the Federal Reserve's next move likely lower even after 1.75 percentage points of cuts over the past 15 months. So, it's no wonder that the Wall Street handicappers are uniformly calling for further upside for 2026, collectively penciling in a 10% or better rise. The recent tape action has done nothing much to dampen the optimism. The past two months of mostly sideways churn within 3% of record highs for the S & P 500 has helped to rebalance the market, puncturing the aggressive sense of destiny around many AI plays, subduing some speculative misbehavior and allowing valuations to settle. .SPX YTD mountain S & P 500, YTD The Nasdaq 100's forward price/earnings ratio has receded to 26, a couple of points below the two-year average. Its premium to the broader S & P 500 was last this narrow more than six years ago. Such a reset might make it even easier to wax bullish given there are fewer conspicuous excesses to explain away. Fair enough. Though the fact that history, the weight of the evidence and human nature all support bullish expectations means next year's reality will be scored against somewhat elevated expectations. FactSet reports that 57.5% of all analyst ratings on S & P 500 stocks are Buys. This matches the highest level since at least 2010, which was reached in February 2022, just as the market was rolling over from exuberance into a nine-month bear market. Bespoke Investment Group notes that the S & P 500's trailing three-year return of 87% at the October high places it in the best 5% of all three-year performance tallies. While forward returns on average have been positive after similar three-year runs, the gains have been far weaker than average. Some historical pattern relationships also advise staying on the ride while preparing for some bumps. Ned Davis Research keeps a cycle composite for the S & P 500, which blends the one-year seasonal template, the four-year electoral cadence and the decennial pattern (years ending in 6, for instance). For 2026 this maps to muted upside thanks largely to the history of some poor midterm election years, with a multi-month stretch of dead money in the middle. Any given year, though, is made from broad tendencies interacting with specific, often surprising, circumstances. While the swing factors are inherently unpredictable, there seem a few broad questions hovering over the market as 2025 slips into the past. Key questions for 2026 Should investors truly hope for a "broader" equity market next year? The purported narrowness of market performance and the observable top-heaviness of the S & P 500 have been the inescapable starting point for most market debates of the past few years, it seems. Sometimes, the disagreements are a matter of semantics. Has the S & P 500's 16.2% gain this year been thanks to a mere handful of stocks? Not literally, no. The equally weighted S & P 500 is up 10.7%. Yet that performance gap itself conveys the hazard of owning too little of the largest index weights. And if three stocks – Nvidia , Alphabet and Broadcom – were flat on the year, the S & P 500's gain would be lower by a third. A steady succession of professional investor guests on CNBC TV have pushed against the idea of mega-cap-tech dominance by deploying the talking point that only two Magnificent 7 stocks are outperforming the S & P 500. First off, it's now three ( Tesla just joined Alphabet and Nvidia). Second, all but one of the Mag7 ( Amazon ) is up more than the median S & P 500 stock is this year (5.9%). And the fact that Broadcom – larger than Meta Platforms and Tesla – is not in the Mag7 basket is a mere historical quirk. Beyond these facts, though, it's correct that other parts of the market are making important contributions. The cumulative daily tally of rising versus declining stocks has made plenty of new highs lately. Bank stocks are providing clear leadership. Cyclicals more broadly have got in gear as the crowd positions for the universally anticipated early-2026 upshift in economic growth. But, to circle back, should investors want the 35% of the S & P 500 represented by the Mag 7 to materially underperform? It's perhaps desirable for pros paid to beat a daunting benchmark, even if that index goes down. But bull markets rarely undergo a comprehensive transition of leadership at mid-gallop. This is the AI bull market. This allowed it to become the first bull market to have begun before the Fed finished a tightening cycle. Among bull markets that did not get underway in proximity to a recession, this one's overall gains have actually been well above the average. This is thanks to the enormous value built up by the perceived promise of AI and the unprecedented sums being urgently spent to create it. Sure, let's hope for a good, rotational uptrend, perhaps more broad-based earnings growth, one that allows the expensive tech leaders to cool off periodically before breaching the bubble zone and without buckling the entire tape. But a market in the hands of small-caps, chain retailers, railroads and biotech firms is likely a more hazardous, less trustworthy one. Can the globe supply the amount of capital likely to be demanded by issuers next year? Last week, OpenAI was reported to be raising $100 billion privately at an $800 billion valuation, larger than all but a dozen U.S. public companies. It will require several more such infusions to fund its current commitments. SpaceX is said to be plotting an IPO at a $1 trillion-plus mark. Anthropic is said to be in the mix here. And then there are years' worth of pent-up new offerings that will want to try to get out ahead of these goliaths. An active IPO market is a mark of a sturdy, if maturing, bull market. Up to a point. The S & P 1500 (made up of small-, mid- and large-caps) totals around $63 trillion, a deep and vast equity pool. Yet next year, the hyperscalers' capex ambitions are expected to deplete the sums devoted to share buybacks, to the point where Goldman Sachs is projecting a notable upturn in total shares outstanding for the S & P 500. Bull markets usually end with recessions, economic shocks or Fed tightening. But a less-friendly supply-demand relationship is sometimes part of the mix. Will crypto's struggles matter for stocks? Bitcoin has not convincingly regained its footing from the October flash liquidation, sitting some 30% below its peak above $124,000 ten weeks ago. Not long ago, this likely would act as a drag on the Nasdaq , with bitcoin acting like nothing so much as an amplified version of the tech sector. Yet the Nasdaq is back within 3% of its former peak, opening the jaws wide on its chart against bitcoin. While probably healthy if this is a sustainable de-linking, it raises questions about the retail-trading corps, which skews toward crypto holdings and has been a core source of risk-seeking energy for this market. Is there a chance bitcoin is losing access to the speculative juices? While this is just educated conjecture, perhaps bitcoin's presence in ETFs and institutional asset allocations has made it a kind of boring, "normie" money. BTC.CM= YTD mountain Bitcoin, YTD Bitcoin is all it was designed to be and all it's ever going to be. It dates back some 15 years, which means to a 22-year-old Robinhood brokerage customer, it doesn't have the whiff of the new and exciting (when price momentum is not winning fans), certainly compared to quantum computing (which one day could crack bitcoin) or helicopter robotaxis. Much of the recent selling is by some of the most-tenured bitcoin holders. There's a whole subsector of companies that turned away from crypto mining to help power AI data centers. Does this amount to a loss of bitcoin's status as a risk barometer at the far edge of technological enthusiasm? Or is this just a set of overdrawn conclusions about an asset merely undergoing a correction after a blistering run and setting up a contrarian buying opportunity given heavy ETF outflows? Just asking questions here.
