One of Wall Street’s biggest bulls on what to expect in 2026

In roughly a year, the S&P 500 should be sitting at the never-before-seen level of 8,000, after yet another double-digit run-up for blue chips.

At least that’s how Bankim “Binky” Chadha, chief global equity strategist at Deutsche Bank, sees it.

That 8,000 price target — published in Chadha’s 2026 outlook for US equities — implies a roughly 17% rise from Wednesday’s year-end close, and is one of the highest forecasts issued by Wall Street analysts in their end-of-year flurry of reports, of which we’ve been keeping track. (Only one other official forecast that we’ve seen is higher: Oppenheimer & Co.’s 8,100.)

“I actually don’t think it’s such a bullish target,” said Chadha, who joined Deutsche Bank from the International Monetary Fund in 2004 and has since served in a few different research roles at the German bank.

Rather, he thinks the consensus view on the US economy has been, and remains, too pessimistic.

Chadha stressed that since the Trump administration’s announcement of much higher-than-expected tariffs in April — triggering a sell-off that pushed the S&P 500 to the brink of a bear market — the economy has consistently proven itself to be more resilient than expected.

“At the end of the day, equities go into a bear market when the economy goes into a recession,” he said. “No one is talking about a recession right now.”

Instead, Chadha suggested that sustainable GDP growth is starting to translate into an uptick in revenue growth, particularly for those companies outside the megacap tech giants — like the Magnificent 7 — that have provided the vast majority of the profit growth the S&P 500 has experienced over the last two years.

Chadha said fast-growing tech stocks have contributed nearly 90% of the earnings growth for the S&P 500 over that period. But in the most recent Q3 earnings season, that contribution declined to 68%, by his reckoning. Importantly, that drop wasn’t because giant tech earnings disappointed — they were actually better than expected.

But the earnings contribution from the non-tech part of the market was much more robust than predicted. That enlarged the overall earnings pie and made tech’s contribution to growth smaller on a relative basis.

“I think at this point the broadening will basically continue,” Chadha said, adding, “That is very positive.”