The S&P 500 closed at a record high on Friday, but only two of its eleven underlying sectors could say the same. The first was technology, which as we noted last month, has been showing consistent relative strength since May and was boosted by a more than 10% gain from Apple for the week. However, the other sector to do so may surprise people: consumer staples.

We haven’t talked much about consumer staples recently, because as one would expect in a strong bull market, they have consistently lagged the broad market. Since the S&P 500 bottomed in March 2020, staples have underperformed the S&am

We believe pent-up demand, gradual improvement in supply chain challenges, solid labor force growth, and productivity gains will all contribute to another year of above-trend economic growth in 2022. COVID-19-related risks remain and the potential for a policy mistake may be elevated as the economy moves towards normalization, but we think the overall environment will be supportive of business growth and ultimately equity markets.

The U.S. economy bounced back from its worst year since the Great Depression in 2020 with one of the best years of growth in nearly 40 years in 2021. A combination of record stimulus, a healthy consumer

LPL Research is extremely excited about the release of Outlook 2022: Passing the Baton. You can see the interactive version of our Outlook here.

In conjunction with the release of the Outlook, this week in the LPL Market Signals podcast, Jeff Buchbinder and Ryan Detrick discussed the latest on the Omicron variant and what an earlier tapering could mean, while also breaking down where LPL Research sees the economy, stocks, and bonds going in 2022.

About Last Week

It was super volatile for stocks last week, as Fed Chair Jerome Powell hinted at an earlier tapering, while Omicron uncertainty is high. Jeff says that

The entire team at LPL Research is so excited to announce the release of Outlook 2022: Passing the Baton. It is hard to put into words the amount of time and cross department organization it takes to get something like this off the ground, but we think you’ll love the final product.

From the actual Outlook, to an interactive look at the Outlook, to special webinars, to videos, to podcasts, to social media, to a Power Point presentation, there are so many ways that our nearly 20,000 Advisors can leverage and share Outlook 2022. (Please note, some of the mentioned ways to leverage Outlook 2022 are only for our LPL Advisors, n