Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s chief U.S. equity strategist, David Kostin, is set to retire at the end of the year after more than three decades with the investment bank.
The strategist, who joined Goldman in 1994 and moved to the portfolio strategy team in 2004, will be replaced by Ben Snider, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg News.
“It’s been an honor to have this position,” Kostin said in an interview. “It’s a super fast-paced culture at the bank, where you work with a lot of extraordinary people. There are high standards, and the market’s always changing. But after 40 years as a Wall Street analyst, this is a good time for me to retire.”
Kostin “brought a client-first approach to equity market analysis, developing rigorous frameworks and delivering differentiated products and insights,” Jan Hatzius, the bank’s chief economist, wrote in a separate memo.
A Goldman spokesperson confirmed the contents of both memos. Bloomberg has also reached out to Snider for comment.
Kostin, who will become an advisory director at the bank, has ranked among Wall Street’s most influential strategists. The S&P 500 ended last year near his target of 6,000, and his other notable calls include a warning in 2024 that US stocks were unlikely to sustain an above-average performance of the last decade.
The strategist also created the popular Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund VIP index, which tracks the top long positions of fundamentally-driven hedge funds and is the basis for an eponymous ETF.
In 2025, President Donald Trump’s policy whiplash has roiled financial markets and upended forecasting models across Wall Street banks. Strategists including Kostin had to first abandon and then revert to bullish calls as Trump imposed, then walked back, historic tariffs on global trading partners.
Kostin, who has changed his end-2025 target for the S&P 500 Index four times, said the swings had made it “challenging” for forecasters as the policies disrupted the outlook for economic growth and inflation.
“It’s been a story in a few chapters this year alone,” he said. “We think about three variables in our models: earnings, valuation and money flow. That framework became uncertain after the tariffs but there have been many challenging forecasting periods throughout my career.”
That evolution in markets is part of his message as he hands over the reins to Snider, who joined Goldman as an analyst in 2010 and was named managing director in 2017. Kostin said he had worked with Snider on the transition through this year.
“The key is to add value in a market that gets more efficient all the time,” Kostin said. “The lesson is that things are always changing so how do you stay looking around the corner to try to find ways to add value to clients?”
(Credit: Bloomberg)
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