Looking back on life’s events can be both dangerous and educational.
Dwelling on the past is waste of precious time, of course, but reflecting on hurdles overcome, lessons learned and things accomplished can be useful to do better in the future.
That’s why I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at 2025 to review events that seemed huge at the time but proved to be mere speed bumps as we move ahead to 2026.
Let’s start with January.
The fourth quarter earning reports were solid and so the market had a good month. The Fed left the fed funds rate unchanged. Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 143k.
In the sports world, Ohio State beat Notre Dame for the college football championship (will they repeat this year?) and the PGA season kicked off in Hawaii. Sadly, that might be the last time for a long time that we see the Kapalua golf course on TV due to water issues.
In February, tariff talk starts to cause concerns in the market and fears about the price of eggs ravaged the land. About 151k jobs were added during the month and the market slumped over the finish line to end the month in the red but still up for the year.
In the sports world, the Eagles won the Super Bowl over the Kansas City Chiefs and Luka was traded to the Lakers in one of the most shocking trades in sports history. The end of February also concluded two months of Kentucky being covered in ice and snow. Golfers rejoiced.
March was when we started to feel some pain from the tariff talk. The total market fell about 6% while international stocks actually posted a gain. The tech sector especially took it on the chin since they had enjoyed a strong previous set of months. “Liberation Day” would happen on April 2nd.
In the sports world, “torpedo bats” (made by Louisville’s own Louisville Slugger) made quite a splash when the Yankees used them to hit a team-record nine home runs in one game on March 29th. In sadder news, the UofL Cardinals men’s basketball team received a terrible (and very unfair) seeding in the NCAA tournament and lost to Creighton.
There wasn’t really much good news as April arrived. This would be the low point of the year. A 10% baseline tariff on most countries and higher “reciprocal tariffs” on many more, including some of our larger trading partners, freaked the market out since we didn’t get much clarity on how all of this was going to work. Not to say I knew that corporations in America and around the world were going to figure out how to still make money, but it seemed fairly easy to predict. How consumers were going to be impacted was a whole other story. I think that impact is still being digested.
The good news happened just about a week later (after the market’s temper tantrum) when a 90-day postponement was announced and the market rejoiced with its largest one-day gain since 2008. It even started a new rally on April 22nd and finished the month in good spirits since corporate earnings growth was estimated to be around 12.8%. The market seemed to say, “We’ll worry about these tariffs another time.”
As far as sports in April, Rory winning the Masters is the only thing that really mattered (in my opinion – no one really cares that Florida won the NCAA Tournament). Here’s a video of every shot that Rory hit during the final round without any commentary. It’s just him hitting golf shots and I think it’s very close to being a work of art. Link to the video is here.
In May, the VIX fell below 20 after hitting close to 60 in April. This means that the volatility had fallen sharply. For the month, the S&P returned 6.3% and the NASDAQ rose 9.6% as the tech sector rebounded sharply. Investors who didn’t freak out were rewarded. Chalk that up to one of the main lessons of the year: stay the course.
In the sporting world, Sovereignty won a soggy Kentucky Derby and Journalism won the Preakness.
Welp, we’ve made it to June, the halfway point of the year and investors found reason to push the market higher, to the tune of 5% for the month. All time highs! And the market didn’t even seem to notice that Israel and the U.S. pulled off bombing several of Iran’s military facilities. By the end of June, the S&P 500 was up 5.5% for the year.
Probably the most impressive sporting event in June was from the tennis world, when Carlos Alcaraz won a marathon, five-hour and 29-minute match against Jannik Sinner to win the French Open.
July saw some more clarity about the tariffs and the market rewarded that with an increase of around 2% for the month. Tech companies and AI-affiliated firms drove the market higher with Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet exceeding expectations, while Amazon’s cloud growth did not.
The Tour de France kicked off in early July and Scottie Scheffler trounced the field at the British Open, beating Harris English by several strokes. Oh, and he won the PGA Championship back in May, also beating Harris English by several strokes. Scottie made just under $50 million for the year, despite missing time on the course early in the year due to a cooking accident.
One simmering theme during the year was whether or not the Fed was going to cut rates. With the tariff situation now somewhat being sorted out, the market was focused in August on what Jerome Powell was going to do. This debate sparked one of my favorite times in the market when Wall Street can’t decide if good news is actually bad and vice versa (since bad news could lead to a Fed cut but good news could mean no Fed cut). Wall Street is very ridiculous sometimes.
Anyway, and as always, corporate earnings are what drive the market and those earnings were good in August and the market rose 2.4% for the month. It didn’t hurt that Nvidia posted sales growth of 50%!
It wasn’t on the level of Rory winning the Masters, but Tommy Fleetwood finally won a big golf tournament (the Tour Championship). Maybe nice guys do sometimes finish first.
September (usually not a great month for the market) saw strong gains as earnings were above expectations and the Fed signaled that it was open to further cuts, on top of the September cut that they agreed to. This monthly gain by the U.S. total stock market (of 3.4%) was the fifth consecutive monthly gain. Even bonds went higher. Again, panic is not a plan.
In the golf world, something happened in September up in New York but we don’t need to think about that.
October is when everyone seemed to start wondering if all of this AI spending was causing a bubble and what we should all do about it. And I agree that there comes danger when just a handful of stocks (in this case, tech stocks) have an iron-grip on the market’s steering wheel because diversification is crucial for the long-term investor just like it is for the stock market overall. Diversification seems dumb in the good times and life saving when the bad times arrive.
In Fed news, for the second time in 2025 they did decide to cut rates by 25 basis points to a target range of 3.75% to 4%.
An incredible 18-inning World Series game was the highlight of October for the sporting world. The Dodgers would go on to win the series in a dramatic seventh game over the Blue Jays. Those poor fans in Toronto. Sometimes I’m happy that the Reds never get my hopes up.
We’ve reached November! And volatility is back! The S&P declined 5.7% from its high in October but the S&P was still up 17% year to date at this point and the Nasdaq was up more than 20%. The index did manage to end the month in the black, by just 0.2% gain. But a gain is a gain!
Precious metals continued to rip higher, with silver breaking out to a new high in November. This run by both gold and silver has been one of the wilder things I’ve seen in my career since you usually don’t see investments thought to be safe havens (such as gold and silver) rise at the same time that aggressive investments (such as tech companies) both climb at the same time. But the market isn’t a rational place, as we well know.
November in the sports world was notable for the University of Louisville beating UK in both basketball and football. And the NFL season is one of the strangest on record with plenty of surprises and upsets.
Thanks for reading this far! I hope you enjoyed all 1,500 words of this stroll down memory lane.