What Ken Fisher Sees Ahead for Stocks in 2026

Transcript

In January, people always want to have a view of what the year ahead may look like. I don't know why that's particularly more important in January than the 12 months at the beginning of February, the 12 months beginning in March or what have you. But, it's a custom in our culture.

What I would say about 2026 is, it is unlikely to be as strong a year as 2025, but it is likely to be a stronger year than most people think.

If you were to put that in perspective, I would say the odds placed this as a year that's return greater than 10% for the broad global market, but a return that's lower- and that 10%, of course, is the average historical year for the stock market as a whole, but that includes bull markets and bear markets to get to that 10% average. The average bull market year alone averages about 22% per year within bull markets. And I doubt that we get that high. Of course, anything's possible and stocks are volatile, so it only takes a few days to get, you know, 3% or 4% wiggle in one way or another. And I think there's no way to be very precise about any of this stuff.

Some of the features that lead to that view, which I'll probably elaborate more on as the year progresses, include-that decades ago, I proved that the consensus of professional forecasters for market outcomes-capital markets outcomes- is wrong 12 months out. That is, they-being avid collectors of all known information-are reflections in their views at a moment in time of what all known information should mean. Which means it is that which stocks pre-price, and they pre-price it out with that universe of people about 12 months. And the reason that works that way is that the average person isn't as trained in this stuff, isn't as able to have access to all widely known information as professionals are because professionals tend to have planned access to information.

And in that regard, the professionals tend to be, in a sense, overly confident about their views or what I refer to often as "wronger, stronger and longer." And in that, this year, unlike last year, the consensus of 69 new forecasters that I could find around the world-professionals of good standing-forecasting the S&P 500, singularly, have only two that show negative returns at all.

So there's few pessimists, but at the same time that returns clustered about 9%. And therefore there's not many optimists either... more extreme optimists. And that puts the most likely outcome for the market as either a negative return or return above 10%.

Now the reality is, as John Templeton famously said, "Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria." And that's not always true, but it's usually true. And we have not gotten to euphoria. The fact that some people think we have is a pretty good sign that we have not. Because when you actually get into euphoria, our voices scream against anyone that thinks you're in euphoria.

But, the easiest way to see that we're not in euphoria is that we have not had a plethora of big IPOs, initial public offerings, and there's a large universe of big private companies that have been accumulating over the years, that haven't gone public, that are likely to go public this year in what would be called "mega IPOs." The poster child for that is SpaceX. And Elon Musk has said there's a good likelihood that SpaceX goes public in 2026. But then there's also other ones, like Databricks and Anthropic. Kraken. There's a whole little universe of these mega IPOs. Bigger IPOs than we've ever seen before. And that actually would be signs of euphoria. We haven't really gotten there yet.

So I think that-not not drag on too long- the economy is going to do okay globally. It still is likely to be a year like 2025 where non-US stocks do better than US stocks. Value-oriented stocks do better than growth-oriented stocks. Likely to be a year, again, where tech does fine but doesn't lead the world.

And the United States should do fine, but not lead the world, and in that regard, be surprising to a lot of people and be what I would say, in summary, is a good, solid, but not spectacular, year.

Thank you for listening to me. I will flesh out subset details of the things that I've said, with perhaps minor variations as the year goes on, and try to fill you in on those month by month. Thank you for listening to me. I hope you found this video enjoyable and useful.

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