January 12, 2022

The Appetizer

“Show me the money!”

Jerry Maguire famously said this back in 1996, and the S&P heeded his call to action in 2021…

Now, on to the numbers. Drum roll, please …

• The S&P 500 returned 26.9%, to the cheers of the “buy the dip” crowd.
• Inflation reached highs not seen since 1982… $1.25 pizza doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like $1 pizza.
• GameStop’s highest price in 2021: $347.51 – that’s roughly $347.43 more than what most of us would get for trading in our video game collection.
• The most trending search term on Google in 2021 was NBA, maybe driven by people trying to figure out how to spell Giannis Antetokounmpo’s name.

Dig In
2022 Outlook

2022 will be full of Balancing Acts. For example, you’ll try to balance your spending as you resist the urge to buy the items that are in stock once again, and the Federal Reserve (Fed) will look to tighten policy just enough to rein in inflation. Ultimately, our experts believe the Fed’s efforts should prove to be successful. After all, it’s been practicing this act for over 100 years now.

As impressive as last year was, we, and the rest of Wall Street, believe economic growth will be strong again in 2022. Stocks can continue going higher, but look for the ups and downs to increase, potentially providing even more “buy the dip” opportunities. Be selective with your stock picking as companies capable of posting a profit or growing revenue may well come into favor.

We are all learning to live with COVID-19, and many things the pandemic brought about are here to stay. Think e-commerce, work from home, and virtual reality. In our Outlook report we provide you with a cheat sheet of investment considerations and things to look at as you build your portfolio.

There's more to unpack in our 2022 Outlook: Balancing Acts, which you can read here. or watch here.

Weekly Specials

We’re a little jealous of the James Webb Space Telescope. The replacement for the Hubble Telescope launched on Christmas Eve and is running away from Earth and 2021 to an orbit almost 1 million miles away. Among other missions, the Webb Telescope will search for exoplanets beyond our solar system. Ahh, life beyond our solar system…

If you can’t tell, we may have drunk a few spiked seltzers during our Zoom happy hours in 2021. Some of those tasted an awful lot like soda… Coca-Cola got wise and plans to release a spiked Fresca drink later in 2022. But why didn’t they just go for the home run? Rum. And. Coke.

Some good news: 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November. Wait, what? Your filling in for quitting coworkers is actually a good sign for the economy as we push into 2022. Workers feel confident in the job market as it continues to recover from the Covid recession. Unemployment fell to 3.9%, moving closer to full employment.

The Dish

Apple was the first company to reach $1 trillion, $2 trillion, and…you guessed it, $3 trillion. It took the company 42 years to be worth $1 trillion, two years to be worth $2 trillion, but just 17 months to cross the $3 trillion mark, thanks to the pandemic’s turbo-charged demand of smartphones and computers. Is there a pattern here?

Already missing BBM? BlackBerry announced some of its phones “will no longer be expected to reliably function” as it transitions to a software company. The phones, however, are still expected to be reliable paperweights.

Did you stockpile essential products at the start of the pandemic? Well, Toyota has been stockpiling automotive parts since 2011 after an earthquake disrupted its production. Now, the doomsday prep has paid off. Toyota dethroned GM as the top-selling automaker in the U.S. last year.