As we head into 2026, markets are generally pretty bullish. Despite a couple of policy-related hiccups and bubble scares in 2025, the S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq all posted healthy returns. And why shouldn’t that continue?
Analysts are of the opinion that the good times will continue to roll—not least because of the massive stimulus packet set to land in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. However, there’s also an understanding among Wall Street analysts that the conditions for success are getting narrower and narrower. For example, much of the market’s optimism this year has derived from the promise of AI despite questions mounting about how and when the bets will pay off. If any news to spook confidence emerges, it could have an outsize impact on stocks.
Likewise, the economy has managed to weather the potential downsides of tariffs, immigration policy, inflation, and employment. So far, employers have managed to find a balance: Reduced business confidence and higher prices, leading to reduced headcounts, have been offset by a shrinking labor market, as people have been told to, or have chosen to, leave the U.S.
But what if you had to sum all of this up in one word? Well, thanks to the powers of AI, you can. Fortune fed the 2026 outlooks of 15 of Wall Street’s biggest banks into a Perplexity model, and asked it to summarize them all with a single word:
It spat out “precarious.”
