Stock Market Today: Apple Leads Sweet Start for Stocks in 2022

Good luck finding fault with how Wall Street kicked off the new year.

The major indexes all closed out Monday with gains (including fresh closing highs for the Dow and S&P 500) and Wall Street crowned its first $3 trillion-dollar company (albeit briefly).

About the latter: Apple (AAPL) – which became the first company to reach $1 trillion in market capitalization in 2018, then two years later staked the first flag into the $2 trillion mark – momentarily peeked its head above $3 trillion in Monday's session on the back of another bullish note from Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives.

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"The Street is starting to better appreciate the robust fundamental story for Cook & Co. over the next year," says Ives, who believes high demand will bolster the company's March and June quarters. "Hitting $3 trillion will be another watershed moment for Apple as the company continues to prove the doubters wrong with the renaissance of growth story playing out in Cupertino."

Ives adds that iPhone 13 checks continue to be "much stronger than expected," and that the company believes AAPL sold more than 40 million iPhones during the holiday season, which would mark a record for Apple despite facing chip shortages.

AAPL closed just below the $3 trillion mark, but its 2.5% gain nonetheless helped to lift the major indexes into the green.

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average improved by 0.7% to set a new record close of 36,585, while the S&P 500 climbed 0.6% to hit a record-high 4,796. The Nasdaq Composite was the biggest advancer, however, up 1.2% to 15,832. The small-cap Russell 2000 mimicked its larger brethren, climbing 1.2% to 2,272 to kick off the new year.

Other news in the stock market today:

• U.S. crude oil futures enjoyed a nice 1.2% improvement to settle at $76.08 per barrel. That helped energy finish among the market's top sectors, with gains coming from the likes of Schlumberger (SLB, +5.9%) and Exxon Mobil (XOM, +3.8%).
• Gold futures did not participate in the market's larger gains, sliding 1.6% to a two-week low of $1,800.10 per ounce.
• Bitcoin marginally improved since New Year's Eve, to $45,910.34. (Bitcoin trades 24 hours a day; prices reported here are as of 4 p.m.)
• Tesla (TSLA) was one of the major drivers of the Nasdaq, up 13.5% to start the new year. The company announced over the weekend that it delivered 308,600 vehicles during the fourth quarter of 2021, beating expectations for 267,000. More over, its full-year tally of 936,172 deliveries (up 87% year-over-year) topped estimates for 897,000.

What Does 2022 Have in Store for Tech?

Apple wasn't the only sector winner in what was a productive day for technology shares. Chipmakers Intel (INTC, +3.3%) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, +4.4%), as well as fintech firm Fiserv (FISV, +3.7%), were among other stocks moving the needle Monday.

It's a great start for a sector that both offers high hopes, but faces several hurdles in 2022.

"When we asked our teams what keeps them up at night about their outlooks, our analysts expressed concerns about increasing interest rates and the impact on valuation, regulation, execution risks, spending cycles and competition," say RBC Capital Markets strategists in their 2022 look-ahead.

Nonetheless, "Tech ranks the best among all sectors on our quality metrics, ranking at or near the top for all factors that we evaluated."

Thus, while investors can try to access technology through targeted funds like a few of our best ETFs for 2022, some might be better off trying to identify individual opportunities for the year to come.

You can start your search with our 12 best tech stocks of 2022, which includes everything from recent initial public offerings to technology mega-caps that have been household names for decades.