With 2024 fully behind us, it’s a good time to celebrate our winning calls from last year while also reviewing some mistakes to learn from them and improve our process. The good news is we got more right than wrong last year, but there were some misses. Some course corrections helped. Perhaps the most impactful decision we made was to recommend investors stay fully invested in equities at benchmark levels throughout the entire year despite expecting a stock market pullback around Election Day.

The Federal Reserve (Fed) is moving more cautiously in adjusting policy, and markets might have a hard time resetting expectations. Throughout the latest press conference with Fed Chair Jerome Powell, equity markets declined as investors were befuddled with the large upward revision to 2025 inflation forecasts; despite disappointing inflation projections, the “vibecession” is over as businesses and consumers have become more optimistic.

To say the U.S. economy has been difficult to read is an understatement. From generationally high inflation and interest rates to concerns about the labor market, it’s no wonder consumers are unsure about the overall health of the economy.

LPL Research’s Outlook 2025: Pragmatic Optimism will be released tomorrow and available on LPL.com. Here we just provide an appetizer before the main course and share some of the stock and bond market themes covered in the full publication.