2024 Outlook On The Economy And Global Markets

If one were to rank the biggest drivers of stock market performance in 2023, mega-cap dominance and the missing recession would likely be atop the list. The Magnificent Seven (“Mag 7”) stocks – Amazon
AMZN
, Apple
AAPL
, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft
MSFT
, Nvidia, and Tesla
TSLA
– provided the bulk of US stock returns during the entire year, with the market gains only beginning to broaden out in the final quarter. Much of the Mag 7 outperformance was attributable to a bounce back from their underperformance in 2022, but they also found favor due to their financial stability relative to other stocks as investors waited on a Fed-induced recession. Also, it didn’t hurt that they each have considerable exposure to Artificial Intelligence (AI), the two most important words in investing in 2023.

Economists and financial industry experts were quite confident that the US would experience a…