The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that at the end of 2022, Wall Street's many gurus forecast that 2023 would be a year to forget. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe says that they saw high inflation, a looming global recession and rising interest rates as sapping households' buying power and denting corporate profits. For investors, they pencilled in paltry gains and one of the worst performances for the S&P 500 in the past 15 years. The market pros got the story only partly right. While interest rates did climb to a near two-decade peak, the S&P 500 soared to a near-record high. Fuelled partly by a rally in the so-called Magnificent Seven megacap tech stocks, it rose nearly 25 per cent last year, as of Thursday's close, shaking off a banking crisis, wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and slowing growth in China's economy. "2023 was a great year for the contrarians," David Bahnsen at wealth manager Bahnsen Group said in a statement. Goldman Sachs is in the bullish camp. Its analysts upgraded their year-end 2024 call on the S&P 500 to 5,100. They made the change after the Fed's surprise statement Dec. 13 that the equivalent of three interest rate cuts were on the table for 2024.