Legendary Wall Street forecaster Bob Doll is having his best year

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Legendary Wall Street forecaster Bob Doll is having his best year originally appeared on TheStreet.
Stock market prognosticators are wrong so frequently that observers can rightly wonder if they're making forecasts using the oldest soothsaying methods, drawing pebbles from a pile, dropping hot wax into water, using random dots on paper or, of course, trying to find something magical in numbers.
Yet at the start of every year – and again at the midpoint – countless market watchers take their crack at divining the future, mixing educated conjecture, informed hunches and the occasional WAG (wild-ass guess).Measured just about any way possible, most of those projections are wrong.
CXO Advisory Group analyzed more than 6,500 forecasts—using methodologies ranging from fundamental to technical analysis—made by 68 experts on the U.S. stock market from 2005 through 2012. The investigation found that the accuracy of the forecasts was below 47% on average.
That loses to a coin flip.
From Black Monday star to today's afterthought
Bad calls tend to be forgotten quickly, as soon as a forecast is updated based on new information. Winning picks are lionized and celebrated, even though the expert may have less staying power than a bull market rally.
Wall Streeters sometimes call the tendency to place too much trust in a guru who made the most recent good call the 'Elaine Garzarelli Effect.' Garzarelli made her reputation as a Lehman Brothers investment strategist by urging clients to get out of the stock market the week before the Black Monday crash in 1987.
That call made her one of the most widely quoted strategists on the Street, but it was also the pinnacle of her success. Whether it was brilliant prescience or dumb luck may be argued forever, but she never really duplicated that success.
Garzarelli failed to generate much interest when she tried running mutual funds and a call on stocks being 25% undervalued late in 2007 as the global financial crisis was looming, further dimmed her star.
While old-timers remember her name – she runs Garzarelli Research and her newsletter suggests that she is currently bullish on small- and mid-caps plus transportation stocks – she is like many one-time stars, known more for one right call than for being right consistently over years or decades.
Bob Doll's forecast record beats coin flips, by a lot
One Wall Street analyst who hasn't shied away from forecasts -- and has a stellar track record -- is Bob Doll, chief executive and investment officer at Crossmark Global Investors.
In a 40-plus-year career, Doll has also been the top equity strategist at Blackrock, Nuveen, Merrill Lynch, and Oppenheimer Funds; at each of those stops, Doll—a regular guest on CNBC, Fox Business, and seemingly all financial media outlets—has started each year with 10 forecasts for the coming 12 months.Doll holds his picks up to a grader each year and historically has been right 72% of the time. That's roughly where he stood with his 2024 prognostications. He has said that his best years ever put him at just above 80%.
Entering 2025, Doll was expecting 'fewer tailwinds, but more tail risks.' His picks reflected that, calling for 'some bumps in the road, but some good news and probably more volatility,' in an interview on Money Life with Chuck Jaffe that aired in January.
Now, seven months later, Doll is getting the results he expected.
Eight of Doll's 10 picks tend to be tied to the economy and stock market, with one tied to politics and a wildcard. This is what Doll was calling for entering 2025, and how it's turning out:
Slower economic growth as unemployment rises past 4.5%. The jury is out on this one, but if unemployment hits Doll's target – it's currently just north of 4% -- mark this as a win.
Sticky inflation that stays above Fed's 2% target, causing the central bank to cut rates less than expected. Barring a Fed surprise, this one's on track.10-year Treasury yields primarily between 4% and 5% with wider credit spreads. The 10-year Treasury has spent the year in that range; credit spreads were up around the tariff tantrum but have narrowed since. But if there's an economic slowdown, they will widen and this one will be a winner.
Earnings fail to achieve the market's consensus 14% expectation entering the year, and yet every sector has up earnings. This forecast is virtually a lock at this point, even with Doll expecting a second-half slowdown that could hurt some sectors.
Equity volatility rises, with the VIX average approaching 20. The VIX averaged 18.5 in the first quarter and 24.4 in the second, so this call –and the VIX has only been this high in two of the last 13 calendar years – might have seemed like a longshot but now looks like a sure shot.
Stocks experience a 10% correction and price/earnings ratios contract. The correction went on the books in April, and P/E ratios are down and appear likely to stay that way. This can be marked in the win column.
Equal-weighted portfolios beat cap-weighted portfolios and value beats growth. Both of these conditions are true at the moment; the question is whether that will hold up through December.
Financials, energy and consumer staples outperform healthcare, technology and industrials. This looked like a sure thing into June, when the margin of outperformance shrank. If financials weaken, it could put this one in jeopardy; barring that, it looks like another win.
'Congress passes the Trump tax cut extension, reduces regulation, but tariffs and deportation are less than expected.' The tariff forecast here is the one thing where Doll looks like he's wrong and won't recover; by year's end, this one is likely to look half-right, making it the one clear blemish that's building.DOGE efforts make progress but fall far short of $2 trillion in annualized savings. Even Doll acknowledges that this was a softball.
In a July 22 interview on Money Life with Chuck Jaffe, Doll acknowledged that he now expects to be right at least 70 percent of the time, 'but I wish coming into the year we knew which seven we were going to get right. We could make a lot of money. The problem is you don't know which ones you're going to get right and wrong.'
What Bob Doll think happens for the rest of 2025
As for the rest of 2025, Doll gave three quick assessments for where things stand now: "One, the economy is slowing. We just don't know how much it's going to slow. Two, we're beginning to see tariffs show up in the inflation numbers. We don't know how much. And number three we have this tailwind called [artificial intelligence] which is real and is keeping things moving."
Further, Doll said he expects the AI play to broaden out. The tailwind called AI has also been particularly strong at the high end of the market. We all were expecting some measure of breadth this year. Are we going to see the breadth show up at some point? Yeah. Well, it obviously occurred in the first quarter, and then it went away in the second quarter.
While Doll noted that tariffs seem to be showing up in slight increases in the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, he did not think they would cause a spike in inflation over the rest of the year.
"I don't think [the impact of tariffs on inflation] it's going to be horrible," he said. "It's just going to be there. Remember, only 15% approximately of our GDP is from outside the United States. The other 85 is pretty domestic. So it's limited by how much of the economy it really affects.
"Now, having said that, remember the Fed saying 'We've got to get inflation down to 2% and they're struggling at 3% and we're not going to get to 2%. And that means all these people who want the Fed to lower rates are going to have to wait a little bit longer."Legendary Wall Street forecaster Bob Doll is having his best year first appeared on TheStreet on Jul 27, 2025
This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jul 27, 2025, where it first appeared.