:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-2223939889-9d7abbfb80784f00988c2d7dd1ed22eb.jpg "Trump Is Predicting Dow 100,000. Here’s What It Would Take to Get There.")
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Key Takeaways
- The 30-member index would have to post an annual return in the mid-20% for the next three years to get there.
- The Dow at 60,000 to 70,000 is a more “reasonable” target, Jeremiah Buckley, a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson, said.
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Stock market predictions are getting huge.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average recently closed above 50000 for the first time, prompting one very enthusiastic fan—namely, President Donald Trump—to project that the index would double by January 2029. “I am predicting 100,000 on the DOW by the end of my Term,” Trump said in a social media post that attributed the index’s most recent milestone to his policies.
Is that big, round number possible? It would defy historic averages, according to market experts, who even through rose-colored glasses—and assuming index constituents show outsize earnings growth—see a move to 100000 in under three years as a reach.
INDEX 101
The Dow, made up of 30 “blue-chip” stocks, is a bellwether of how the U.S. economy is doing, which may explain why President Trump recently focused on it. The S&P 500, which covers a broader swath of publicly-traded companies, is usually referenced to measure the stock market’s health.
“I’m optimistic about equity markets over the next couple years,” Jeremiah Buckley, a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson, told Investopedia. “Doing some quick math, I think 60000 to 70000 is a reasonable three-year target for the Dow—but 100000, to me, seems hard to get to in that short period of time.”
The Dow took roughly eight years to get from 25000 to 50000. Based on historic return averages going back to 1928, the index would need about 10 years to get 100000, according to data compiled by State Street Investment Management, the firm behind the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA). More recent long-term averages suggest it would take between five and 10 years.
If the Dow could buck historical trends, what would the 30 members of the index have to do? Their earnings growth would have to be around 25% a year, according to Janus’s Buckley. The Dow’s estimated 2026 earnings per share is $2,357, representing a compound annual growth rate of 10% from 2023, according to State Street.
Another thing to remember: The Dow is a price-weighted index of 30 high- and more modest-growth companies. Its top-priced constituent is Goldman Sachs (GS), followed by Caterpillar (CAT) and Microsoft (MSFT). And while there are a few tech majors like Nvidia (NVDA) and Apple (AAPL) in the mix—the kind of companies that might, broadly speaking, be expected to power an index higher— they have smaller weightings.
Even with record earnings per share growth, one would have to assume “quite a bit of multiple expansion” for the Dow to get to 100000, Buckley said. Currently, the price-to-earnings ratio is sitting at around 30, representing a historical high going back to the late 1990s.
