🚀 Retail Investors Outperform Wall Street

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Market Overview
Read time 1.4 minutes

Year To Date Performances:

1. In a year that fundamentally challenged the "dumb money" stereotype, retail investors closed out 2025 by significantly outperforming Wall Street’s professional class through a combination of strategic resilience and high-conviction pivots. By aggressively "buying the dip" during the April "Liberation Day" tariff crisis and leveraging the so-called "TACO" (Trump Always Chickens Out) trade, everyday traders captured a 9.5% single-day surge while institutions remained sidelined by policy uncertainty. This newfound sophistication saw retail portfolios—anchored by record-breaking inflows into gold (GLD) and a shift toward high-growth names like Palantir and Nvidia—achieve profit-to-loss ratios that surpassed institutional AI-driven software baskets, ending the year with the S&P 500 up over 17% and retail participation hitting levels not seen since the 2021 meme-stock craze.

2. In 2025, the investment narrative shifted from purely terrestrial AI to the "orbital economy," as a surge in U.S. defence spending and the looming SpaceX IPO propelled satellite stocks to gains exceeding 200%. Driven by President Trump’s $175 billion "Golden Dome" defence project and NASA's pivot toward commercial partnerships under Administrator Jared Isaacman, legacy players and newcomers alike hit all-time highs. Planet Labs led the pack with a nearly 400% surge, fueled by AI-driven satellite imagery deals with NATO, while EchoStar transformed its balance sheet through a massive $40 billion spectrum liquidation to AT&T and SpaceX. As the military-industrial base undergoes a digital reindustrialization, these "space-infrastructure" companies have transitioned from speculative ventures into essential pillars of national security and global connectivity.

3. U.S. equity markets are closing out a historic 2025, with the S&P 500 poised for its third consecutive year of double-digit returns, up 17%, despite a brief late-December dip. The year was defined by an incredible recovery from the "April Tariff Rout," which nearly triggered a bear market—as the artificial intelligence narrative shifted from a monolith to a "fractured" landscape, with winners like Alphabet (+65%) and laggards like Amazon (+6%). Beyond big tech, the real story of 2025 was the explosive "flight to safety" and industrial demand in commodities, which saw Gold surge over 66% and Silver skyrocket by 165%, outpacing even the Nasdaq’s 21% AI-driven advance. As Wall Street resets for 2026, analysts anticipate continued volatility as corporate earnings struggle to justify the high valuations left over from a three-year bull run.

   Headlines

   1. $160M in export-controlled Nvidia chips were illegally smuggled into China.

   2. Ro Khanna has proposed a nation wide study into state-level tax spending to determine levels of fraud after proposing a billionaire wealth tax.