Taking stock of a great run for stocks

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Let's start with the obvious: If you own stocks, 2025 was good to you.

If you were sitting in broad index funds — the kind of set-it-and-forget-it holdings many upper-income-tier types automatically reach for — you're likely up about 16% for the year, roughly in line with the S&P 500. If you tilted toward tech or held Nasdaq $NDAQ-heavy funds, you're closer to 20%. And if you've been holding individual stocks? Well, depending on which you own, you may be looking at gains that would have seemed wildly optimistic at the start of the year.

It can seem abstract until you log into your accounts. For anyone with a 401(k), a taxable brokerage account, or even a modest Roth IRA, 2025 has been the kind of year that makes long-term financial planning feel a little less daunting. In practical terms, a $100,000 portfolio that tracked the S&P is now worth $116,000. Double that balance, and you've added more than $30,000 in wealth without lifting a finger.

For readers of this newsletter, many of whom I would guess are active investors rather than purely passive ones, the gains have likely been even better. If you held the basket of Magnificent Seven stocks, you probably did well. If you held Palantir $PLTR or Micron $MU? You had a year that changes the math on early retirement, house down payments, or college tuition.

That's worth acknowledging before we dig into the specifics. It's easy to get numb to double-digit percentage gains when markets have been strong for years, and when 2024 and 2023 were even better years for investors But if you participated, you benefited in ways that will compound for years to come.

So with that in mind, let's look at what actually drove those returns — and which stocks led the charge. Many of the biggest winners won’t surprise even casual market observers, much less anyone who can name the mega-cap tech giants from memory. And yet, a few unexpected names still managed to muscle their way into the top ranks.

Breaking it down by category makes the broad trend ultra-clear.

Hardware

Western Digital $WDC, a major maker of high-capacity hard drives, gained an eye-watering 275% through late December alone. Seagate $STX Technology, another data-storage play, posted 226% returns as investors bet on AI-infrastructure demand.

Micron Technology’s 210% surge similarly speaks to the “hard” side of the AI trade that defined the year. In 2025, the company rode historic demand to record revenue, margins, and cash flow, with high-bandwidth memory emerging as a core growth engine. Investors responded by sending the stock—over and over, throughout the year—to new all-time highs. The 12-month price chart looks less like a hockey stick and more like a rocket launch.

That same pattern was seen across semiconductor-equipment plays as investors looked beyond GPUs to the entire manufacturing stack. Lam Research $LRCX began the year trading around the $70 mark, and will close it trading around the $170 mark, with the stock up nearly 150%.

Software

As AI-related hardware rallied, so did software and platform companies with clear AI hooks. Palantir Technologies was among the year’s biggest gainers, rising 157%, buoyed by growing government and enterprise contracts and a story that framed its software as foundational to AI-driven decision-making.

Platforms

The AI stock boom didn’t happen in a vacuum; retail investors helped power the trend. So no wonder some retail trading platforms also had a banner year. Robinhood Markets surged as stock market enthusiasm and crypto trading translated into revenue momentum, with the stock packing on a total of 209%.

Gold

Among the most interesting market trends of 2025? The surge of precious metals — traditional safe-haven plays — right alongside tech and growth. It’s an unusual pattern that harkens back to the market’s post-pandemic moves. In any case, gold had a historic run, with prices surging 70% through late December.

Unsurprisingly, with gold prices pushing to fresh highs, miners like Newmont also rank among 2025’s top performers. The logic here is straightforward. Higher bullion prices, steady production, and improved balance sheets make miners a leveraged way to take advantage the broader precious-metals trade, so investors pile into bellwethers like Newmont, up over 180%; Barrick Gold, up 200%; and Agnico Eagle Mines, up 130%.

Surprise stock gains

Some of the year’s biggest percentage gains came from companies clawing back just a bit of their glory-days glow. Intel $INTC, long written off as an also-ran, posted 80% gains as investors warmed to its foundry ambitions and government-backed manufacturing push. Takeover interest — to mean something more like a high-stakes takeover battle — saw Warner Bros Discovery $WBD top 180% returns after years of underperformance.

Market watchers won’t be shocked to learn that the Magnificent Seven broadly delivered around 20% returns on average in 2025, roughly in line with the tech-heavy Nasdaq’s strong year. What may surprise, though, is the clear standout within that group. Alphabet $GOOGL surged roughly 60% in 2025 alone, pulling decisively ahead of its mega-cap peers.

The Google parent’s rally gathered steam as it emerged as a favored holding of Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B, and as its latest Gemini 3 chatbot closed the gap with ChatGPT. At the same time, buzz around a potential strategic deal involving Meta $META Platforms added an extra layer of intrigue, helping turn Alphabet from a steady compounder into a headline grabber.

What the winners have in common

Strip away the sector labels, and 2025’s best-performing stocks share a few traits. Most had market caps comfortably within the mid-cap range, if not large-cap. Most offered access to major market themes — AI infrastructure and AI enterprise spending, or the “debasement trade.” And alongside these themes, a great wash of capital surged into the market.

That last point matters. In a tighter market, capital is rationed. In 2025, it wasn’t. Investors chased AI upside even as they hedged with gold — perhaps making for a strange banner year, but a banner year nonetheless.

What about 2026?

I'm not a financial advisor or a stock picker, but I'm comfortable saying this: I don't see the tech powerhouses underperforming the broader market over any sustained timeframe. Sure, Amazon $AMZN and Meta both lagged the market in 2025 — but I'm not worried. The competitive dynamics are too strong. These companies acquire or crush competitors before they become real threats, and their economics generally improve over time rather than deteriorating. Their relationship to regulation is also… let’s call it proactive.

In all, I think 2025 reinforced something that’s easy to forget in bearish or simply more middling years: When capital is abundant, it doesn’t spread evenly. It concentrates — in companies with pricing power, political leverage, balance-sheet strength, and a convincing growth narrative.

For investors, that’s both comforting and uncomfortable. Comforting, because the winners tend to stay winners longer than skeptics expect. Uncomfortable, because the winner-take-all and strength-begets-strength dynamic can be hard to swallow. It’s not what many of us would hope to be true. But no one ever said the market would deliver tidy morality tales, did they? At least the returns are real. At least the brokerage statements don’t lie.