The stock market has been predictably unpredictable in 2018.

While those words pretty much apply to every year, of course, this one — with a steady diet of explosive moves both north and south for the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -1.92% , the S&P 500 SPX, -2.37% and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -3.01% — has been particularly difficult to handicap.

That’s not stopping the Wall Street forecast machine, though.

Credit Suisse’s Jonathan Golub is particularly bullish with his S&P target of 3,350 by the end of 2019. On the flip side, Morgan Stanley’s MS, -2.54% Michael Wilson forecast a dreary run, with his expectation of 2,750, which is the same as his target for 2018. In other words, two years of completely dead money.

As the targets for 2019 start to roll in, it’s worth taking a step back to ask: who actually called the market’s direction in 2018... and who was totally blindsided?

In addition to the big banks, we’re including some other notable market calls that peppered our site and daily “Need to Know” column throughout the year. (Sign up to get Need to Know delivered to your email box here.)

Some nailed it. Some, to put it kindly, did not. Others still have time. If you’re looking for some insight into the year ahead — and which forecasters to take seriously — then perhaps let history be your guide...

Here’s our roundup of the boldest market calls of the year — good, bad and TBD.

In late January, Ray Dalio, the head of the world’s largest hedge fund, went full bull, saying investors “are going to feel pretty stupid” if they sit around in cash in 2018, and that a “blowoff rally,” in which investors begin to rush into equities for fear of missing out on gains, would take the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq to ever-new heights. “We are in this Goldilocks period right now. Inflation isn’t a problem,” he said. “Growth is good, everything is pretty good with a big jolt of stimulation coming from changes in tax laws.”

Stocks did soar for a bit, but both the Dow and the S&P are now down about 7% since around the time Dalio made that call. As we round out the year, it’s pretty safe to say “blowoff rally” won’t be how it goes down in the history books.

Dalio, to be fair, seems to be getting more right than wrong. Bridgewater has easily outperformed the S&P year-to-date with a gain of about 10%.

Still, considering the immediate aftermath of his “cash” call...

Grade: F

At the very beginning of the year, Bill Miller, founder of Miller Value Partners, said investors should prepare for a huge rally. “Those 10-year yields TMUBMUSD10Y, 0.668% go through 2.6% and head toward 3%, I think we could have the kind of a melt-up we had in 2013, where we had the market go up 30%,” Miller said. In 2013, investors began to lose money in bonds, prompting them to take money out of bond funds and put it into equity funds, he said. Yields rise as Treasury prices fall, and they have been rising of late. Still, Miller’s meltup call is looking just about as terrible as Dalio’s.

Grade: F

On Feb. 26, we posted a call from Goldman Sachs that stocks could drop up to 25% by the end of the year if — and this was a big if — the yield on the 10-year Treasury reached 4.5%. The bank’s base case was for 3.25% by the time 2019 arrives, but it didn’t count out the possibility of a much more dire outcome. The 10-year yield did hit 3.2% in November, but has since come back down to below 2.9%. And stocks, of course, are nowhere near a 25% decline on the year.

Grade: TBD

CFRA’s Sam Stovallsaid in late March that the infamously pricey S&P was looking less expensive after its stumbles early in the year. At the time, the index was trading at 16.6 times forward-year estimated earnings, just slightly above its average multiple of 16.4 since 2000. Stovall had a 12-month price target of 3,000 on the S&P at a time that the index was trading just above 2,600.

“We believe the correction has likely run its course and is now working its jagged way back to break-even,” Stovall said at the time. A few months later in July, the S&P exited correction territory at around 2,850 — though the index has yet to hit that 3,000 target (he’s got until March, though) and, as the year comes to a close, is below 2,700. But, taken in the short term, Stovall’s forecast came good.

Grade: C

Gold’s midsummer slump to fresh one-year lows led Steven Jon Kaplan of the True Contrarian newsletter to call for a rebound in the long-suffering precious metal when it was trading around $1,244. “We are transitioning to a bear market for most U.S. equities,” he said. Such a move, he predicted, would likely give a boost to mining stocks, as gold and gold-related companies tend to shine when stocks tumble. His prediction didn’t pan out for the summer, but the turmoil in stocks in December is fueling a bit of a rally in gold — now at $1,247 after dropping below $1,200 in August — and has some market watchers calling the end of the bull market.

Grade: C

Erik Swarts of the Market Anthropology blog nailed it on Aug. 2 when he said a big unwind in stocks was starting to look like what happened to silver seven years earlier. “Equities are taking the long goodbye,” he wrote. “Should the comparative continue to prove prescient, equities are now on the backside of the long retracement rally that began in April.” And, with October’s drop, it did just that. Silver US:SIH9, meanwhile, has dropped more than 17% this year.

Grade: A

Scott Minerd, chief investment officer for Guggenheim and one of the world’s pre-eminent bond-fund managers, said in late October that stocks could see a rally of as much as 20% within a few weeks and months. “I think we’re going through a classic seasonal adjustment,” he said. But the good times won’t last, Minerd warned, predicting a drop of up to 50% for the market in 2020, when the Fed’s run of hiking interest rates comes to an end.

Grade: D for the short-term call, TBD on the rest

On Nov. 2, Ralph Acampora, a well-known market technician, issued a stark warning. “From a technical perspective, the damage that has been done technically to the stock market is much, much worse than people are talking about,” he said. He cited a break down of so-called FANG stocks — Facebook FB, -2.24% , Amazon AMZN, -4.12% , Netflix NFLX, -4.18% and Google parent Alphabet GOOG, -3.42% — as the clearest sign that the worm has turned on the bull market.

Acampora said he believed the entire stock market would go into a bear market and that the current dynamic was eerily similar to the stock-market crash of 1987, when the Dow slid a historic 22.6% on Oct. 19 of that year.

Grade: TBD

The Slope of Hope blog’s Tim Knight in early November forecast a brutal finish to the year and laid out a road map as to how it would get there. “Maybe there will be a severe political crisis. Maybe the debt choking the planet will finally start to matter,” he wrote. “Whatever it is, an honest-to-God vicious selloff will begin, dwarfing what was seen in the autumn.”

There have been some big declines in December, but there’s also been rebounds to keep losses in check. All told, the Dow had its worst start to the month since 2008, losing 4.5% in a week. Not quite “honest-to-God vicious” just yet.

Grade: B

John Hussman didn’t give a definitive timeline, but in early November he said he believes the S&P 500 is about to embark on a decline that will ultimately bring it down below 1,000 due to the Fed’s easy-money policy that has left a menacing “trap door under the market.” Way too early to tell on this one... but yikes!

Grade: TBD

Joel Kruger, currency strategist at LMAX Exchange, warned on Nov. 30 that disaster could be awaiting the stock market. “If there are any signs of fallout like the fallout seen at the APEC summit, it could spook the market into a December risk liquidation,” he said in emailed comments. “If you look at the S&P 500, November has been a wash after the market saw a sharp reversal in October. If we take out the November low, I would expect an acceleration below the yearly low, at which point it could get ugly.” Ugly, yes, that’s about right.

Grade: A

And there you have it, a mixed bag for the market callers. We’ll see if 2019 is any easier to predict. Our prediction: It won’t be.