Mike Wilson isn’t afraid to stand out from the crowd in an industry that doesn’t often reward that type of behavior. In late 2021, the Wall Street veteran, who is now Morgan Stanley’s chief investment officer and chief U.S. equity strategist, argued that a bear market was on the way amid the toxic combination of Federal Reserve interest rate hikes and slowing economic growth—which he labeled “fire” and “ice.”
At the time, the consensus forecast on Wall Street was for the S&P 500 to rise roughly 1% to 4,825 by the end of 2022, but Wilson’s price target was the lowest of his peers at 4,400, with a bear case of below 4,000. The pessimistic prediction turned out to be correct, as the S&P 500 slipped roughly 20% last year to 3,839, earning Wilson top stock strategist honors in an October 2022 survey by Institutional Investor.
But 2023 has been a different story.
In January, the Morgan Stanley CIO argued that the S&P 500 could drop as low as 3,000 in the first half of the year as corporate earnings growth slowed, before mounting a second half recovery to 3,900. But the index has done pretty much the opposite, rising more than 12% year to date to over 4,300 on the back of slowly fading inflation and enthusiasm for artificial intelligence as a potential driver of future corporate growth.
Still, even as other investment banks have begun to increase their price targets for the blue-chip index—Goldman Sachs, for example, now sees the S&P 500 ending the year at 4,500, up from 4,000 at the start of the year—Wilson isn’t backing down from his bear market thesis.
“With the S&P 500 rally now crossing the 20% threshold, more are declaring the bear market officially over. We respectfully disagree due to our 2023 earnings forecast,” he wrote in a Monday note. “The bear is still alive.”
Wilson’s base case is for the S&P 500 to drop roughly 3% over the next 12 months to 4,200, but in a bear case scenario, he believes the index could fall to 3,700, or around 14% from current levels. He argues that stocks are in the midst of an “earnings recession” that hasn’t been priced in, and Wall Street’s profit expectations are too robust.
More than 70% of S&P 500 sectors have forward earnings expectations from Wall Street that are “at least 20% above pre-COVID levels,” Wilson wrote Monday, noting that even Morgan Stanley’s earnings forecast for the overall index, which is seen as bearish on the Street, is “10% above the long-term earnings trend line.”
The key to Wilson’s bearish theory is the idea that falling inflation will lower corporate profits, just as rising inflation helped to increase them in 2021. As Fortune previously reported, businesses were able to pass on rising costs during the pandemic and increase profit margins. But now, with inflation falling and economic growth slowing, we’re entering a natural period of “margin compression.”
“That’s driven by the same things that made the profits go up, coming down,” explained John Leer, chief economist at business intelligence firm Morning Consult. “You’ve got weaker demand, realized and expected; you’ve got slower inflation, realized and expected; and less ability for businesses to pass along elevated costs to consumers.”
Wilson also argued on Monday that higher interest rates are leading the economy into a “boom/bust regime” like what was seen after World War II. He explained that during both WWII and the pandemic, consumers built up excess savings during a period when the supply of goods and services was constrained, causing inflation and the stock market to surge when the economy reopened. Then a period of higher interest rates followed, which ultimately sparked a bear market and a recession in 1948. But before the economy entered that recession, there was a sizable bear market rally that lured in many investors. Wilson fears modern investors are falling into this same trap again.
“After the boom in 1946 following the end of the war, the S&P 500 corrected by 28%, followed by a 24% choppy bear market rally that lasted almost 18 months before succumbing to new lows a year later. Thus far, this appears similar to the current bear market, which corrected 27.5% last year and has now rallied 24% from the intraday lows,” he wrote, arguing more pain is likely ahead for stock market investors.