The following is an excerpt from an article in The Australian Financial Review, published on August 9, 2026. Download the full article.
Lori Calvasina has spent more time in Australian traders’, fund managers’ and analysts’ ears than just about anyone else on Wall Street.
The RBC Capital Markets US equities strategist is all over Bloomberg’s radio and television programs, including the popular Surveillance podcast, as well as CNBC, Fox Business and other shows out of Wall Street. She starts her days with these interviews in New York, and Australian traders often start theirs by listening to replays or highlights on their morning commutes.
Calvasina has a following for a few reasons: her framework for equity market sell-offs, her bottom-up approach to a high-level S&P 500 target price, and her weekly Pulse report, which is not for the fainthearted.
Last week’s Pulse, which Calvasina says was a shortened summer holiday version, was 86 pages and included about 150 different charts.
She reckons Wall Street’s S&P 500 will get to 8150 points in the coming 12 months, or an 11.4 per cent gain, to when she last “froze” her models. That target is the approximation of the median and average of five models – sentiment, valuation/EPS, stocks versus bonds, economy and interest rates – and she said it will be a “non-linear” path to 8150 that may even include what she would call a “garden-variety” sell-off.
“We think of it as our compass,” she says of the target. “That target isn’t a GPS. It’s a statement on the general direction of travel – are we bullish, and how much or why?”
That 8150 says the answer is yes, Calvasina is bullish, and it should be another decent year on Wall Street. “It’s higher, but it’s not heroic,” she says. The market has ripped since she last froze the models and ended last week at 7758 points.
Calvasina debated this 12-month target and its inputs – earnings, inflation, bond yields, interest rates, etc. – with Australian clients last week, including some of the big superannuation funds and asset managers on her first trip to Sydney as RBC’s top strategist. She did a lunch at the bank’s Sydney office on Thursday, armed with an 87-page chart book.
This very detailed approach has made her one of the most influential equities strategists on Wall Street. Some strategists (such as Morgan Stanley’s “run it hot” Mike Wilson, perhaps) tell nice stories and find charts to match, while Calvasina is all about her five models and the plethora of charts and analysing them to get the story.
Takeaways from last week’s meetings with Australia-based investors, in which our conversations focused on inflation / interest rates / the Fed, the US midterm elections, and the rotation trade.
