Dan Ives Says the S&P 500 Is Heading to 8,000 This Year. Here’s How His Past Dated Market Calls Have Aged

Dan Ives spent years as Wedbush’s best-known technology analyst before leaving this summer to co-found Yorkville Ives, and he hasn’t toned down his forecasts. On The Pomp Podcast on Oct. 22, he said that six months ago, anyone told that oil would be $105 or $110, the 10-year Treasury yield would be 5% and the Fed would be raising rates would probably have guessed the S&P 500 at 6,500 to 6,800. The index closed that day at 7,663.43. Then he went further:

The S&P 500 closed at 7,722.60 on Oct. 27, so 8,000 is 3.6% higher, and 2.3% above the record close of 7,818.93 set on Oct. 6. Ives makes a lot of calls with numbers attached, so we went back and scored the ones that came with a deadline.

Scoring His Dated Calls

Our rule: a call counts if Ives publicly named a number, whether an index level, a company’s market value or a percentage gain, plus a deadline, and a dated news report or his own post recorded it. We found 16 from 2021 through 2025. When he restated a target with a new deadline, we scored the first version. Price and market-value targets count as hits if any daily close reached them by the deadline. Percentage calls are measured at the deadline. His “tech stocks” calls never named an index, so we used the Nasdaq Composite.

He hit 9 of the 16. The company calls did best: 6 of 8 market-value targets came true, including TeslaTSLA at $1 trillion in 2021 and again in 2024, and NvidiaNVDA, MicrosoftMSFT and AppleAAPL at $4 trillion in 2025. The Microsoft call was the closest of those: by our math, it first closed above $4 trillion on Oct. 28, 2025, and its best close of the year was about $4.03 trillion.

The misses cluster in calls on how far tech stocks would climb. Only 2 of his 6 percentage calls hit, both in big years for the Nasdaq: it rose 43.3% from his December 2022 call through the end of 2023, and 28.6% in 2024. His call for another 15% in the second half of 2024 got 8.9%. His 25% call for 2025 got 20.4%. Two big market-value calls also fell short: Apple ended 2021 just under $3 trillion, with a best close near $2.96 trillion, and his bull case of $2 trillion for Tesla by the end of 2025 peaked around $1.63 trillion.

His Previous S&P 500 Target

Ives has put a number on the S&P 500 before. In an interview reported by TipRanks on July 1, 2025, with the index near 6,205, he said it could hit 7,000 by the end of 2025. The best close it managed was 6,932.05, on Dec. 24, about 1% short. His call in the same interview for the Nasdaq to climb another 15% by year-end ended at 14.1%.

Ives and the S&P 500, as of the Oct. 27 close

What Bettors Say

Bettors on Polymarket put the odds of the S&P 500 closing 2026 above 8,000 at about 33% as of early Oct. 28, the midpoint of bids at 28 cents and offers at 37 cents. A separate contract on whether the index touches 8,000 at any point before the year ends had bids at 47 cents and offers at 72 cents, too wide a gap and too little trading to read much into.

The index has come a long way this year. It fell to 6,343.72 on March 30, down 7.3% for the year, and was up 12.8% by Oct. 27. Reaching 8,000 by Dec. 31 would make 2026 a 16.9% year. Carson Group’s Ryan Detrick still sees record highs by year end, and stocks have a history of rallying after midterm elections.

What to Watch

The midterm vote is today, and Ives tied it to his outlook. On the same podcast, he said a blue wave in which Democrats took the House and Senate “would be hugely negative for tech and AI,” a view he agreed with “at first blush,” before adding that “a lot of that bark could be worse than bite.” His case rests on AI spending, which he said is less than 15% of the way through. The Fed raised rates in September, and the 10-year Treasury yield closed at 4.99% on Oct. 27.

Two numbers settle this call: the S&P 500’s close on Dec. 31 against 8,000, and whether it gets there at all before then. His record says to watch the deadline as closely as the number.