So far in 2024, great focus has been given to the performance of the stock market and the wider economy within the ongoing election year, with a persistent tug-o-war between factions forecasting that the stellar growth will continue into the second half and those seeing little other than doom and gloom ahead.
One Wall Street expert, Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, decided to look farther into the future and make an S&P 500 prediction – a projection for the value of one of the biggest benchmark indices in the U.S. – for the year 2030.
Lee is exceptionally bullish about the upcoming six years and predicts S&P 500 will reach 15,000 within that time frame. Such a rise would mean that the index would grow 173.83% from its press-time levels of 5,477.90.
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Though a 173.83% rise does not sound as impressive in a world that witnessed multiple blue chip stocks – Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) offering the starkest of examples – rise some 200% within months, it is noteworthy that the S&P 500 is up ‘only’ 86.21% in the last five years.
Why Lee projects S&P 500 will hit 15,000 by 2030
Tom Lee’s S&P 500 forecast hinges on two main arguments.
The expert believes that the upcoming surge he predicted will be driven by Millenial and Gen Z investors, who, he explained, will enter the prime earning age bracket of 35 to 50 within the time frame.
Lee reached for the precedents of the Roaring Twenties and the post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s as examples of how the dynamic might play out.
The market strategists also explained that the second big driver of the boom will come in the form of the American technology sector, which he expects will continue its staggering growth as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom matures.
Why Lee’s S&P 500 forecast may be too optimistic
As is frequently the case with forward-looking analyses, recent trends in the economy offer some counter-arguments to Lee’s S&P 500 forecast.
Both anecdotal evidence and reports on real wage growth and wealth concentration hint at millennials and Gen Z playing a far lesser stock market role than anticipated.
Such a notion is further reinforced by wealth data for the millennial generation and the fact that a substantial contingent is already in the ‘prime earning’ age bracket.
The AI boom argument is similarly mixed since, despite numerous major optimists for the technology and its prospects, there are several prominent voices that have already proclaimed it a bubble and that doubt its actual long-term usefulness – at least without additional major breakthroughs.
Finally, it may be worth pointing out that the boom of the 1920s also served as a harbinger of the Great Depression.
The post-war boom was, in large part, driven by the wartime awakening of the American industrial juggernaut and benefited from its successful transformation into a civilian economy backed by the social safety nets offered by the New Deal policies. Also, it ultimately resulted in one of the United States’ biggest inflation crises.
