With just a few trading days left this year, 2025 looks to have been another hot year for stocks. The S&P 500 has returned more than 19% since Jan. 1 as of market close on Monday. Barring a year-end disaster, it will mark the third consecutive year of double-digit returns for investors in the broad U.S. stock market.
Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and financial pros generally caution against making wholesale changes to your strategy based on short-term stock market prognostications. But if you’re invested in the broad stock market, many investment analysts believe that 2026 has the potential to be another great year for your portfolio.
“Certainly we’re at a point where we’ve had incredibly strong performance from U.S. equity markets over the last three years. We don’t think that that means that we can’t have another good year next year,” says Kristy Akullian, head of iShares investment strategy for the Americas at BlackRock. “We are still pretty optimistic in terms of our outlook for U.S. equities. We’re pretty upbeat, relatively bullish.”
Wall Street expects corporate earnings to continue to rapidly grow in 2026. On average, analysts expect companies in the S&P 500 to boost earnings by 15.5% next year, up from an estimated 13.2% in 2025 and 12.1% in 2024, according to data analytics firm LSEG.
