Mike Wilson was uneasy, just as he likes it.
It was April, and President Donald Trump’s trade war had roiled financial markets, making Morgan Stanley’s chief US equity strategist a sought-after TV guest. The studio lights didn’t faze the Wall Street veteran. He’s used to those, thanks to dozens of appearances across business news networks as he rose to prominence in recent years. Talking on TV comes with the strategist’s job.
In a bold move, he stuck to his view that US stocks would rally in the second half, while competitors up and down Wall Street were tearing up their bullish forecasts. That left him virtually alone among his peers in a business where the job can feel safest when you go with the flow. They can’t fire me, it’s easy to think, if I’m saying what everyone else on the Street is saying. “If you’re out of consensus, it’s uncomfortable,” says Wilson, 58.
But Wilson was also confident in his call. It was derived from proprietary models, conversations with clients and years of experience. Many of the fundamental indicators he was monitoring had already bottomed. In his view, the stock market was poised to climb. Paradoxically, as he points out, his discomfort increased his confidence in his call. Indeed, Wilson feels most assured zigging when the strategist pack zags. “It’s hard to make real money from a call if you’re not out of consensus,” Wilson says.
Wilson was right to stick to his guns. The S&P 500 index climbed 36% from its April low through Oct. 8, the strongest six-month run since the 1950s.
A similar out-of-consensus call in 2022 cemented Wilson’s status as a star strategist. He’d correctly prognosticated, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, that the year would see a massive drop in US stocks. The S&P 500 had its worst plunge since the global financial crisis. The majority of his peers at the time had predicted stocks would rise.
Wilson hasn’t always been that prescient. He missed spectacularly in 2023, when he was labeled one of Wall Street’s biggest bears after clinging to predictions of a market crash while peers turned bullish. The S&P 500 jumped 24% that year. His models failed him as he focused more on macro threats to the market—missing the significance of the artificial intelligence trade. “We were wrong,” he says. “Nobody likes to admit that they’re wrong, but we’re all wrong at some points, right?”
Humility doesn’t exactly come naturally to Wilson. Yet over 35 years in the business, he’s developed it. Wilson joined Morgan Stanley in 1989, doing stints in investment banking and sales and trading before becoming chief investment officer at the firm. He was also made chief US equity strategist in 2017. It was an unusual path. On Wall Street, many begin their careers in research and then move on to manage money. For Wilson it was the reverse. He says having been a trader makes him understand the difficulty of his clients’ jobs when he advises them.
Among his peers, Wilson also stands out for his brusque defense of his calls on TV and the radio. He comes across as stern and unsentimental. “Some people probably think—I won’t say this word—that I’m an a-hole, really aggressive and that I want to debate to death,” he says. “In reality, while I’m very competitive, I’m generally a pretty relaxed guy.”
Being right isn’t the point—learning is, he says. Institutional clients “often poke holes in my framework. Sometimes I win those debates, and sometimes I lose them, but most importantly I learn things too—and it goes into my mosaic,” Wilson says. “That’s really what the investment process is about.”
Wilson has been developing his process since he was 13, when his stockbroker mother challenged him to pick an investment. He chose Nike Inc., then a startup sneaker company with a running shoe that appealed to a Texas kid whose best friend was a track star. “The only reason I bought it was the Peter Lynch rule—basically invest in what you know,” he says, referring to the famed manager of the Fidelity Magellan Fund. “All I knew was that waffle trainers were the hot thing.” Wilson held the shares through college at the University of Michigan, where he met his wife of 35 years, and watched the investment surge twentyfold. “It paid for a lot of things along the way. I was hooked early.”
To the investing public, strategists are judged by their calls on where the S&P 500 will end the year. The average view much of the time is for something like a 9% gain—roughly the index’s annual advance over the past half century. In 2022 consensus called for a 4% gain before stocks ended the year down 19% as the last bear market rolled in. In 2023 the average view saw the S&P rising 6%: The index roughly quadrupled that mark.
There don’t seem to be many consequences to getting yearend targets wrong. The average tenure of the 23 strategists tracked by Bloomberg is around a decade. In Wilson’s view of the job, though, the S&P 500 target is the least important of his duties. His real task, as he sees it, is to make sense of the myriad forces pushing and pulling on the market so Morgan Stanley’s institutional clients have a framework for making investment decisions. Indeed, he even says he hates being labeled bullish or bearish. The reason? “It doesn’t do justice to what we’re really trying to accomplish, which is to tell people why and what kinds of stocks are going to work best in this environment,” he says. “One of my objectives for clients is to try and make sense of all this craziness that’s going on with a rational narrative. I’m a bit of a storyteller.”
Then why even bother with the yearend targets? Here Wilson channels the adage about the journey being more important than the destination. The story he wants to tell is how he got to the target, not what it is. “If you don’t know why things are going up or down, you’re never going to be in the right places in the market,” he says. “I’m most uncomfortable when I don’t know why things are happening. Even if we may have the right call, if I don’t really know what’s going on, then I get very nervous, because I’m just confused.”
Wilson scrutinizes a broad swath of investment metrics, from sentiment to fundamentals to technicals. He looks at Morgan Stanley’s “really good proprietary positioning data,” he says. He also monitors some 20 custom-made charts that track things such as the rate of change of valuations and earnings revisions. He likes technical analysis and says some of his best predictions have come around inflection points in trend lines. He browses the social media platform X to get insight into what financial types there are thinking, though he never posts and uses an anonymous account. He also listens to clients—something that seems most important to him. “I learned at a young age that older, experienced people in the business love to share their knowledge and tell you what they know,” he says. “So let them talk and listen. It’s a free lesson for understanding how markets work.”
Wilson has remained bullish since his April call. Interviewed in late September, he still sees the S&P 500 rising to 7,200 by mid-2026. He’s not alone in that prediction—most of the Street expects a yearend melt-up. But Wilson’s prediction comes with a caveat: Stocks could fall as much as 10% before rebounding.
By the end of October, the S&P 500 had only extended its record run, rising to 6,840. With no pullback yet, Wilson has remained uncomfortable but confident, standing apart from peers.
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