Goldman Sachs identifies 33 stocks poised for explosive sales growth as economy reopens

The spring of 2021 arrived with a peculiar kind of optimism. Vaccination campaigns were accelerating. State governors were beginning to signal that lockdowns might finally end. And on Wall Street, analysts were doing what they do best: trying to identify which companies would benefit most from the reopening that everyone could sense coming.

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, had just updated a list it maintains called its revenue growth basket—a collection of stocks chosen specifically because analysts believed they would generate the strongest sales growth in the year ahead. The timing felt significant. For more than a year, the pandemic had carved a jagged line through the American economy, creating clear winners and losers. Some companies, like Zoom, had seen their sales explode by 326 percent in 2020 as people moved online. Amazon and Target had also thrived, posting gains of roughly 38 percent and 20 percent respectively. But others had been devastated. Starbucks had watched its global store sales decline by about 9 percent. Destination XL, a men's clothing retailer, had seen sales plummet by nearly a third.

The logic behind Goldman's updated list was straightforward: the companies that had suffered most acutely from lockdowns were now positioned for the sharpest rebounds. When gyms, movie theaters, and casinos had been ordered closed in March 2020—first by governors in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut—entire categories of consumer spending simply vanished. People stopped going out. They stopped buying clothes. They stopped spending money on entertainment and fitness. Instead, they bought what they needed to survive at home: groceries, electronics, things that could be delivered. But that equation was about to flip. President Biden had committed to having enough vaccines available for every American adult by the end of May. Once that happened, the thinking went, consumers who had been forced to stay home would be hungry to spend again.

The forecasts already reflected this expectation. Analysts were predicting that S&P 500 companies would report revenue growth of 6.2 percent in the first quarter of 2021—the highest quarterly growth rate since late 2018. If that number held, it would signal a genuine economic acceleration. Goldman's basket of 33 stocks was built on the premise that these companies would not just grow their sales but would convert that growth into actual profits, which historically had been the most reliable driver of stock price appreciation.

The list itself was a snapshot of a specific moment: the instant when the market believed the worst was behind us and the reopening was about to begin. Some of the names on it had been household words before the pandemic. Others were smaller, more specialized companies that had been nearly invisible during the lockdown years but were now expected to roar back to life. What they all shared was a single characteristic: analysts believed their revenues would grow faster than the broader market in the months ahead, and that growth would eventually translate into returns for investors who got in early.