The great investor Peter Lynch once observed that more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections than has ever been lost in the corrections themselves. This is a timeless insight, because at any moment in market history, there’s always a credible-looking list of risks, and a roster of respected voices is always happy to recite every item while sounding serious. The market of 2026 is offering yet another case study showing why it’s usually better not to let those statements scare you out of the market.
Through the first quarter and into April, several of Wall Street’s most recognizable commentators made specific, datable forecasts that have already been proven incorrect. The individual calls themselves are less interesting than the mechanism that keeps producing them, so let’s take a look at what was predicted and why.
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On March 30, the highly respected economist Mohamed El-Erian told CNBC viewers he had gone to maximum risk-off and warned against buying broad stock indexes; he probably would have argued against buying something like the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEMKT: SPY) for example. The market bottomed that same day, and then went on to climb more than 10% to a fresh all-time high by April 15. El-Erian’s caution may yet be proven right — the Iran war and the global economic devastation that it could bring is (barely) on pause at the moment, and it might restart soon — but for now it looks like those who ignored his advice have made more money than those who followed it.
Similarly, Peter Schiff told Fox Business in February that the coming economic and financial crisis would make the 2008 meltdown look trivial. Through the weeks that followed his prediction, the market set two separate all-time highs. Again, Schiff could ultimately be proven right, but if it takes years for that to occur, sitting on the sidelines in anticipation of a crash will end up looking extremely expensive and financially suboptimal, as it has tended to in the past.
In the same vein, Jim Cramer told CNBC Investing Club subscribers on March 1 that the portfolio’s most overvalued names were its energy stocks, and that the world had plenty of oil. ExxonMobil then went on to set an all-time high on March 30, well above where Cramer said to lighten up. Exxon itself later disclosed that the Strait of Hormuz blockade due to the war with Iran cost the company about 6% of its Q1 global production. The narrative that the world had a glut of oil collided with a Strait that was physically closed and preventing delivery, which ended up helping the stocks of producers due to higher oil prices.