Full record
MissmarketsS&P 500 earnings growth in 2015 is around 7 percent or better, and the market's price-to-earnings multiple expands.
A scored prediction by Tom Lee, made on .
Scored prediction
Missmarkets“What we're picturing is that earnings growth is around 7 percent or better, and we see the P/E expand,”
S&P 500 earnings growth in 2015 is around 7 percent or better, and the market's price-to-earnings multiple expands.
- Made on
- 2014-12-18
- Outcome
- Miss
- Importance
- 3 / 5
- Effect on score
- -0.84
What counted as right
- Status
- resolved
- Settled on
- 2015-12-31
Both legs must hold for calendar 2015: (a) earnings growth of 7% or more — full-year 2015 S&P 500 operating EPS (S&P Dow Jones Indices) at least 7% above full-year 2014; and (b) multiple expansion — the S&P 500's 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio (FactSet) higher on 2015-12-31 than on 2014-12-18.
Leg (a) fails decisively and by a wide margin: S&P DJI full-year 2015 operating EPS of $100.45 was -11.1% versus 2014's $113.01, against a required +7% or better. The sign is robust across providers — FactSet's differently-aggregated series also shows CY2015 earnings down 0.7%, the first annual decline since 2009 — so there is no conflicting credible evidence on leg (a). Because the criterion is an explicit conjunction ('Both legs must hold'), the record is determined by leg (a) regardless of leg (b). Leg (b) (FactSet forward 12-month P/E higher on 2015-12-31 than on 2014-12-18) could NOT be verified: FactSet's Earnings Insight PDFs for Dec-2014 and Dec-2015 are no longer at retrievable URLs (404), spglobal.com document downloads returned 403, and web.archive.org, Yahoo/WSJ/MarketWatch/stooq market-data endpoints were all blocked to this agent. Directionally, forward P/E plausibly edged higher over 2015 because forward EPS estimates were cut by more than the ~0.7% price decline, but no sourced figure was obtained, so leg (b) should be treated as UNVERIFIED rather than as satisfied. Final S&P DJI operating EPS for Q4 2015 was not published until roughly March 2016; resolved_on is set to the criterion's measurement date (2015-12-31).
Sources
Tom Lee: 2015 will be even better than 2014
CNBC ·
Evidence of what happened
S&P Dow Jones Indices S&P 500 operating EPS by quarter (via YCharts, source listed as Standard & Poor's): 2014 = Q1 $27.32, Q2 $29.34, Q3 $29.60, Q4 $26.75 (full year $113.01); 2015 = Q1 $25.81, Q2 $26.14, Q3 $25.44, Q4 $23.06 (full year $100.45). Full-year 2015 operating EPS was 11.1% BELOW full-year 2014, versus the '+7% or more' required by leg (a) of the criterion.
FactSet 'S&P 500 2015 Earnings Recap: Crude Oil, Currency Drive Decline' (published 2016-01-08) reports CY2015 S&P 500 earnings DECLINED 0.7% versus CY2014 — 'the first time the index has seen a year-over-year decline in earnings on an annual basis since CY 2009 (-8.0%)'. Independent (FactSet) aggregation, same sign: 2015 earnings growth was negative, not >= +7%.
NYU Stern (Damodaran) annual S&P 500 dataset: index level 2058.90 at end-2014 and 2043.94 at end-2015 (price return -0.73%); accompanying S&P 500 earnings 116.16 (2014) falling to 100.48 (2015). Corroborates both a negative 2015 earnings year and a lower index level at year-end.
Corrections
No public corrections.
Effect on the score
-0.84- How sure they sounded
- 80%
- Outcome
- Miss
- Importance
- 3 / 5
This page shows the scored prediction as published; the site doesn't recompute or adjust the score.
Where this came from
S&P 500 earnings growth in 2015 is around 7 percent or bett…- Methodology version
- v1.0.0
- Last computed
- August 5, 2026
- Made on
- 2014-12-18
How this profile was built
Scored by independent judges
Predictions gathered and sourced
Independently verified against sources