Does market timing work? European forecasts, marked.

A few times a year, Reuters asks Europe’s equity strategists where the market will finish. On 27 May 2026, they said 645 ↗ (opens in new tab).

The market in question is the STOXX Europe 600, a broad basket of 600 European companies. The poll put 645 at around 2.6% above where the index stood when the poll came out, so the call was for a modest climb between then and December.

It got there on 2 July. Five weeks.

Nothing needed correcting, of course. A forecast isn’t a promise.

That’s rather the arrangement. Every year, a poll of European fund managers and equity strategists produces a specific number for where the market lands. Newspapers print it. It gets quoted at people deciding what to do with their savings.

The exam is set in public every year. As far as we can find, nobody keeps a mark book.

So we marked a run of it. Forty published calls from Reuters polls between November 2022 and May 2026, each with a date, a publisher and a number attached. Thirty-one have reached their finish line.

Those thirty-one show a middle miss of 6.1%, about the size of the STOXX Europe 600’s whole 2024 rise of 6.0%, counting share prices only and leaving dividends out. Of the two full years our figures can measure, 2024 was the quieter one.

Does market timing work, then? Some people manage it, which is exactly the problem. Nothing we could find lets you check which is which.

Let’s pin down a definition first, because the phrase gets used loosely. Market timing means holding more or less of the market than your plan says, because of what you think is about to happen next. Your colleague who has “gone to cash for a bit” is timing.

Two neighbouring questions live elsewhere. Whether to put a lump sum in now or feed it in slowly is one. Whether to sit tight while the market falls is the other.

How badly did they miss?

Eighteen of the thirty-one were out by 6% or more. The worst was out by 17%. The best was out by 0.1%.

One condition before you enjoy that too much. Twenty-nine of the thirty-one came in too low, and every year they were marked in, 2023 to mid-2026, was a rising one for European shares. From this table alone, you can’t separate the years from the forecasters.

Does forecasting closer to the deadline help?

Five calls against six can’t settle it, and they’re only two of the table’s horizons. The five made about four months out missed by between 3.7% and 6.0%. The six made about seven months out ranged from 1.1% to 17.0%, and the smallest of those eleven misses was one of theirs.

You’d think a shorter run at it would be a safer bet. The six seven-month calls all started about the same distance from the finish line, and got wildly different results. Four months out, the calls bunched closer together than that, and none of them missed by less than 3.7%. The closest call in the whole table, out by 0.1%, was made about nineteen months ahead.

What does a forecast do while you’re waiting for it?

It moves. In May 2025 the consensus for where the Europe 600 would end 2026 was 570 ↗ (opens in new tab). By November it was 623 ↗ (opens in new tab). By February, 640 ↗ (opens in new tab). By May, the 645 at the top of this piece.

One question, four answers, each one issued a little closer to a market that kept setting records.

A poll is also a crowd. One May 2024 poll ↗ (opens in new tab) put the STOXX Europe 600 at 513 by the end of 2024. The individual answers ran from 435 to 600. The headline number, 513, stands in for the lot.

Nine of the forty calls remain live. Six are on where 2026 ends, including that 645. Two are on the middle of 2027, and one runs all the way to the end of 2027. Where the index finishes in December, we don’t know. On this record, neither do they.

Why is timing harder than it looks?

Because it’s two decisions in a row. You get out, and then you get back in, and both have to land. Getting the crash right and the recovery wrong isn’t half a win. It’s a loss with a good story attached.

Your colleague who has gone to cash may well be right about the falling bit. They still need to be right twice.

How often would you have to be right?

One published attempt to work out the bar ↗ (opens in new tab), using US market history, lands on getting at least seven years in ten right, which is a good deal more often than most people assume when they decide to sit a year out.

Not five. Seven. If you could call seven Decembers out of ten, you would not be reading this on a Sunday night.

What does one round trip cost?

Numbers help here, so take one call. It’s a call for a fall, picked because that’s the kind that tempts people to sell.

In November 2022, the poll said the Europe 600 would be at 408 by the middle of 2023. That was roughly 7% below where the index closed the day the poll came out, so the call was for a fall. Say you read it, believed it, and sold €10,000 of a fund tracking the index.

On 30 June 2023 you bought back in. By then the index had closed about 5.5% above where you sold, so the round trip cost you roughly €550 of your €10,000.

That figure is share prices only, so it leaves out seven months of dividends you’d have collected by sitting still. Those land on one side of the comparison and not the other, so on the dividends alone, €550 flatters the trade rather than the reverse.

It’s also before any dealing charge, before tax, and before whatever the cash earned while it sat out. This is one call on one date, put here to size a cost rather than to predict anything, and it isn’t a suggestion to sell or to hold. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results, and the value of investments can fall as well as rise.

Then comes the tax, which people forget because it never shows up on a chart. Sell a fund at a profit in Ireland and the tax is 38% of the gain, whether the fund is Irish ↗ (opens in new tab) or a similar one based elsewhere in the EU ↗ (opens in new tab). That’s the rate from 1 January 2026, and the small capital-gains allowance people know about doesn’t reach it. On a €3,000 gain, that’s €1,140. Buying back in doesn’t give it back.

And in Ireland you meet that tax every eight years anyway, whether you sell or not.

We picked one country to make the number real. Your own rate depends on where you live and what you’re holding it in, and some wrappers change the answer completely.

Was that rebalancing, or was it timing?

The two feel identical while you’re doing them, which is why rebalancing gets used as cover for the other thing. Four questions sort it out.

• Am I moving away from the weights I picked, or back towards them?
• Did a price or a headline set this off, or a date I chose months ago?
• Do I have a written rule for getting back in, or a plan to feel my way?
• Have I worked out the tax?

Away, headline, no rule, no tax. That’s timing. No shame in it, but call it what it is.

So can anybody do this?

Yes, some people can, and saying otherwise would be a tidy little lie. One study of share funds across 17 European countries ↗ (opens in new tab) found about one fund in ten with real timing skill, more than luck could explain. It found roughly the same proportion who were genuinely bad at it. Both halves belong in the same breath, because a pool holding real skill and real anti-skill looks, from the outside, an awful lot like noise.

The catch is checking. Nothing we could find lets you look up whether a fund’s timing worked.

We read the two big European fund scorecards, SPIVA Europe ↗ (opens in new tab) and ESMA’s annual report ↗ (opens in new tab). Both deserve your time. Neither separates what a manager got from moving the money around from everything else they did, so neither settles this question in either direction. Whether active funds beat trackers overall is a separate argument, and a much better documented one.

Our working, if you want to check us

Every settled call, marked against where the index closed on, or just before, the day it was aiming at. One rule: the poll’s own published number, a date, a named publisher, and the date has passed. Every call on the STOXX Europe 600 and the EURO STOXX 50 that we found in the polls listed under the table and that cleared it is in here.

Twenty-nine of the thirty-one came in too low. Every year these calls were marked in, 2023 to mid-2026, was a rising one for European shares, so this table can’t separate the years from the forecasters.

The calls are the figures Reuters published from its polls of European fund managers and equity strategists. The ones in this table come from twelve poll dates. They were 28 November 2022 ↗ (opens in new tab), 22 February 2023 ↗ (opens in new tab), 23 May 2023 ↗ (opens in new tab), 22 August 2023 ↗ (opens in new tab) and 21 November 2023 ↗ (opens in new tab). After those came 22 February 2024 ↗ (opens in new tab), 22 May 2024 ↗ (opens in new tab), 26 November 2024 ↗ (opens in new tab), 26 February 2025 ↗ (opens in new tab), 29 May 2025 ↗ (opens in new tab), 20 August 2025 ↗ (opens in new tab) and 24 February 2026 ↗ (opens in new tab). Each miss is measured against STOXX’s official close for the STOXX Europe 600 ↗ (opens in new tab) or the EURO STOXX 50 ↗ (opens in new tab) on the last day the index was calculated on or before the date the call was aiming at. It is shown as a share of that close.

A call for the middle of a year is marked at the index’s official close on the last day it was calculated on or before 30 June. A call for the end of a year is marked at the index’s official close on the last day it was calculated that year, which was 29 December in 2023 and 31 December in 2024 and 2025. Every level here is share prices in euros with dividends left out, which is the basis the forecasts themselves use. Nine further calls are still open and are discussed above rather than marked here: six on where 2026 ends, two on the middle of 2027, and one that runs to the end of 2027. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.

While you have the table in front of you, see where it stops. It covers the Reuters polls we could find, and nothing beyond them.

And thirty-one rows are not thirty-one separate verdicts. They come from twelve poll dates on two indices that move together, and several rows are marked against a close another row has already used. That doesn’t shrink any individual miss, which is the thing the table is here to show. It does mean you shouldn’t read the row count as thirty-one independent tests.

Mark the one that’s yours

The forecasts we marked missed, which was always likely, and that isn’t the annoying part. The annoying part is that people make real decisions on numbers printed in public, and we still couldn’t find anybody keeping score.

You can run the same exercise on the only paper that concerns you. If you hold something sold on timing skill, two numbers on its factsheet tell you where you stand: the ongoing charge, and how the fund has done against the benchmark it chose for itself. That benchmark is the fund’s own stated test.

They won’t tell you whether the timing worked. Nothing we found will. They’ll tell you some of what you’re paying, and what you got. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and ten years of record settles nothing about the next ten. But you’d be marking the right exam.