MW These 5 charts define the wild year in global financial markets in 2025

By Joseph Adinolfi, Joy Wiltermuth and Gordon Gottsegen

Gold and silver bested bitcoin, while international stocks outperformed the U.S.

Five charts highlight the wild year that was 2025 in global financial markets.

For investors worldwide, 2025 was anything but boring.

President Trump's return to the Oval Office shook up global markets. His aggressive tariff agenda quickly became one of the most consequential stories of the year. Meanwhile, the artificial-intelligence boom soldiered on, with strong performance spreading well beyond members of the "Magnificent Seven."

But for all of the focus on cutting-edge technology, one of the best-performing investment themes this year involved commodities that have been used by humans as stores of value for thousands of years.

"In a year that was supposed to feature crypto and embraced a continuation of the AI-driven bull market, two of the true stars were investment vehicles that have been around for millennia - gold and especially silver. They both far outpaced a down year for cryptos and even a double-digit gain for major stock indices," said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers.

Metals prices went bananas

The metals market has been on fire in 2025, with recent violent moves in silver prompting the Chicago Mercantile Exchange $(CME)$ to raise margin requirements for the second time in a week on Wednesday.

After hitting record highs in 2025, gold (GC00) was up 64.4% this year, while silver (SI00) was 141.4% higher - with both seeing their biggest annual percentage gains since 1979 - while copper (HG00) was up 41.2% on the year for its best yearly gain since 2009, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Yet with China's silver export controls set to hit on Jan. 1 and industrial demand for silver and copper expected to keep pace with the data-center boom, it's tough to imagine the current dearth of supply for silver or copper letting up in 2026.

The S&P 500's epic comeback from April's tariff tantrum

President Trump's "liberation day" tariffs, announced after the closing bell on April 2, sent the S&P 500 index SPX skittering to the edge of bear-market territory, as investors panicked that the aggressive levies imposed by the U.S. might tank the global economy.

But stocks came roaring back after Trump announced a 90-day pause to give his team more time to negotiate trade deals.

By June 27, the index had tallied a fresh closing high, its first since Feb. 19. The S&P 500 took 89 days to recover to its record high, scoring its quickest-ever comeback into record territory following a drop of 15% or more, according to Dow Jones Market Data. (The previous record recovery was a 90-day period in 1998.) All told, the index was down 18.9% from its February record when it reached its closing low for the year on April 8.

All three major U.S. equity indexes - the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA and the Nasdaq Composite COMP - have tallied big gains since hitting bottom. All three were on track for their biggest gains off of a closing low since 2020, according to Dow Jones Market Data - with the Dow gaining 29% from its 2025 closing low through Wednesday, the Nasdaq Composite advancing 55% and the S&P 500 up 39%.

Bitcoin's fourth-quarter fumble

This was supposed to bitcoin's (BTCUSD) big year. In 2024, Trump campaigned on being an ally to the cryptocurrency industry; when he took office, he introduced executive orders, signed the Genius Act and nominated regulators considered friendly to crypto. Meanwhile, a growing number of financial institutions were helping bitcoin go mainstream, and more publicly traded companies started acting as bitcoin treasuries.

But bitcoin ended up disappointing this year. Despite trading above $100,000 in the beginning of the year, the crypto plunged with the rest of the market in April as global tariffs and trade disputes spooked investors. Bitcoin traded below $75,000 at its low for the year; it was able to climb out of that hole and rally with the rest of the market over the subsequent months, and even hit a new all-time high of $126,184.05 in early October. However, it gave up most of those gains over the next two months, entering a bear market as large "whales" and long-term holders exited their positions.

Bitcoin has yet to recover from that selling, ending 2025 around the $88,000 level. That represents a roughly 30% drop from its all-time high - and a 6% drop from where it started the year.

The dollar's downbeat year

President Trump's tariffs and "America First" policy agenda have led to a brutal year for the U.S. dollar. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index DXY, a measure of the greenback against a basket of rival currencies, was down 9.3% in 2025 - on pace to book its worst annual decline since 2017 and its seventh-worst year on record, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Robin Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, pointed out in a new Substack post that those calling for a U.S. recession after Trump's "liberation day" tariff announcements got it wrong, and that many have since become more optimistic about the dollar. But Brooks, a former currency strategist at Goldman Sachs, also thinks the dollar isn't out of the woods yet.

"One of the big puzzles of 2025 is that markets ignored President Trump encroaching on the Fed," he wrote. "It wouldn't be unreasonable for markets to now start zeroing in on this as we near 2026. All this is making me more cautious on the dollar, in contrast to consensus which has become more bullish."

Foreign stocks had a big year

The past 12 months have also been big for stocks trading anywhere but the U.S.

To be sure, U.S. markets still put up a solid performance, with the S&P 500 tallying a third-straight year of double-digit gains and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite seeing even stronger returns.

But by one measure, stocks trading outside the U.S. beat the S&P 500 by the widest margin since 2009. The MSCI All Country World ex-USA Index has gained 29.3% in 2025 as of Wednesday, Dow Jones Market Data showed; that's compared with a gain of 16.9% for the S&P 500. The international index has outperformed by 12.3 percentage points, the most since its 14-percentage-point outperformance in 2009.

Some highlights: Shares of tech firms trading in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea zoomed higher. European defense stocks and European banks also tacked on big gains.

The chart below measures the performance of the iShares MSCI ACWI ex-U.S. ETF ACWX, which tracks the performance of the MSCI All Country World ex-USA Index, against the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY, which tracks the S&P 500.

International stocks also had a strong year on an absolute basis. The MSCI All Country World ex-USA Index is also on pace for its best yearly performance since 2009, when it rose 37.4%.

-Joseph Adinolfi -Joy Wiltermuth -Gordon Gottsegen

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December 31, 2025 14:03 ET (19:03 GMT)

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