How Forbes billionaires predicted the stock market's performance in 2025.
By Simone Melvin, Forbes
Forbes asked 34 billionaires in early 2025 how they thought the S&P 500 index would perform. It turns out that even billionaires can't see the future.
Even market experts can't predict the future. In early 2025, we surveyed 34 billionaires, asking them how they thought the S&P 500 index would perform over the year. More than half of them were significantly wrong.
The S&P 500 ended the year up 16%. That’s an above-average return for the index, which has historically posted about 10% annual growth over the past seven decades, though it’s lower than the 23% and 24% in 2024 and 2023, respectively. Billionaires, however, were less optimistic. Nearly half thought the market would be flat or down in 2025. Another 35%, the largest group of all, predicted growth, but only in the single digits. Only 7 of the 34 billionaires surveyed, or 21%, correctly predicted that the S&P would end the year with growth between 10% and 20%.
"I'm very optimistic about artificial intelligence in general and for that reason I thought its benefits would come much earlier than anticipated," says the investor Samir Mane, Albania's first billionaire, who correctly predicted the S&P return range this year. Shares of big digital technology companies like Alphabet and Nvidia, as well as other AI benefactors like Broadcom and Palantir, have been the driving force behind the market's rise. According to JP Morgan, AI-related stocks have contributed about 75% of the S&P 500's total return. Mane says he expects 2026 to be another successful year for the index, again thanks to AI companies.
Others who, like Mane, predicted correctly include real estate mogul Larry Connor, medical device entrepreneur Joe Kiani, and Florida investor and future Pittsburgh Penguins owner David Hoffmann.
Ask a billionaire
Forbes surveyed 34 billionaires on how the S&P 500 would perform in 2025. Only 7 of them correctly predicted a return of 10%–20%.
On the other hand, 35% of billionaires incorrectly predicted the market would fall, including 9% who thought the decline would be over 20%. Florida homebuilder Pat Neal was among the skeptics.
“I’m surprised that [the S&P 500] did well; I predicted it wouldn’t,” says the 76-year-old, who had thought the market would fall by 10%–20%. ““I thought S&P would follow the economy more closely and, being in the construction business and interest rates being high, I wasn’t optimistic about the economy as a whole or [the index]… And if you ask me about 2026, I’m not very optimistic, but I was wrong about 2025 too.”
Pessimistic predictions of a negative return in 2025 were also made by French logistics billionaire Eric Hémar, Canadian financial services billionaire Stephen Smith, and Canadian real estate billionaire Bill Malhotra.
However, these billionaires did not perform any better than ordinary investors, or even professionals. As early as December 2024, Bank of America was predicting a 10% return for 2025, while Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were predicting around 7.5%. A Vanguard survey showed that the public thought the market would return 6.4% in 2025.
Where the billionaires fared significantly better was in their ability to pick individual stocks. Forbes also asked each of them to name one stock they would recommend to someone else to buy or hold. Three of them, including Neal, chose Nvidia (up 39% in 2025). Other picks included Howard Hughes Corporation (up 4%), XP (up 38%), Palantir (up 135%) and Robinhood (up 200%). Of the 18 specific stock picks suggested by the billionaires, only two lost value in 2025: Indonesian beverage company Tanobel (down 37%) and the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (down 6%).
The planet's billionaires are entering 2026 richer than ever and positioned for another great year, at least according to... Mane, who correctly predicted the market's turnaround in 2025. However, he says that even billionaires' advice should be taken with a grain of salt: "If we could predict the stock market perfectly, we wouldn't be billionaires. We'd be trillionaires."
Forbes.com article
Link in the original language: https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonemelvin/2026/01/01/billionaires-predicted-the-stock-markets-performance-in-2025-most-were-wrong/
