It was a year of wins for investors. Will stocks keep climbing in 2018?

（本文仅为英语学习交流使用。内容摘抄自：华盛顿邮报 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2017/12/29/it-was-a-year-of-wins-for-investors-will-stocks-keep-climbing-in-2018/?utm_term=.2300aef85e0a）

The stock market resembles a locomotive as it heads into 2018.

      Resemble [rɪˈzɛmbəl] 与。。。类似

      Locomotive [ˌloʊkəˈmoʊtɪv] 火车头

Low interest rates, near-record employment, healthy corporate earnings, global economic strength and a mostly-business-friendly Trump administration that saw through an overhaul of the tax system has propelled the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to a more than 19 percent gain as measured by price. If your throw in dividends, the total return grows to more than 21 percent on the year.

      Overhaul [ˈoʊvərhɔ:l] 大修

      Propel [prəˈpɛl] 推进

Yardeni predicts the S&P 500 will hit 3,100 by the end of 2018. That’s a generous pop of 16 percent from present day. He expects a similar increase in the Dow Jones industrial average, a widely watched metric of 30 major U.S. companies that saw high-flying gains in 2017.

Yardeni and others say the present conditions, barring a war or other Black Swan event, offer a rare occasion when the stars are aligned for stocks. He said the push will come from rising earnings. But there are other salutary factors, as well.

       Salutary [ˈsæljəteri] 有好处的

“This is probably as good as it gets,” McMillan said. “The play right now is regulation. Republicans are going to continue to act while they can, and regulation will continue to get hacked away.”

That makes banks, and financial services companies in general, ripe for earnings increases going into next year. McMillan is also bullish on the energy sector, which has been beaten down over the past few years because of an oil glut. Oil gluts push the price of a barrel of oil downward, which also depresses the shares of oil companies.