The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that at the end of 2022, Wall Street's market gurus forecast that 2023 would be a year to forget. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe says they saw high inflation, a looming global recession and rising interest rates as sapping households' buying power and denting corporate profits. Investors duly pencilled in paltry gains and one of the worst S&P 500 performances 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 Magnificent Seven megacap tech stocks, it rose nearly 25 per cent last year, 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. On the pessimistic side is JPMorgan, which carries a 2024 year-end target of 4,200. Its analyst group, led by Marko Kolanovic, sees a struggling consumer with depleted savings, a potential recession and geopolitical uncertainty that could push up commodity prices, like oil, and push down global growth.