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Seeking Alpha’s 2025 year in review spotlights the stories that mattered most to subscribers, tracking the headlines that shaped markets month-by-month. From AI and tech debates to tariffs, bond market volatility, political clashes, and a historic government shutdown, investors were forced to constantly reassess risk and opportunity. The year underscored how quickly narratives shifted and how closely markets reacted.
This is an abridged transcript.
Seeking Alpha editors wrote thousands of articles this year.
With so much news to consume on a daily basis are there any story lines that stand out for you? Well maybe they made our list.
AI, crypto, tech, the Mag 7, weight loss, EV’s. The topics are seemingly endless.
Well Julie I looked at these first of all through the lens of Seeking Alpha subscribers. I checked out the most popular stories throughout the year and then throughout each month and then narrowed them down.
Kim Khan is helping me out with Part 2 of our year in review. In addition to being the host of Wall Street brunch and lunch, he’s also a Senior Executive Editor on the news team at Seeking Alpha.
January started off strong. Who remembers Deepseek? Back in January Deepseek, funded by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, detailed in a paper how Large Language Models can be built on bootstrapped budgets and improved without human supervision.
So did companies really need to break the bank on Nvidia chips and GPU’s or data centers for that matter? The answer. Nothing changed.
But it was something that no one was pricing in. Nobody was anticipating and the entire market had to reprice for a little while.
February brought us the first of several political stories. The one you found most interesting was, “Trump administration tells U.S. agencies to prepare for ‘large-scale’ layoffs.”
And looking at that from an investors perspective it does change the way you look at the economic and macro picture because more people laid off, that’s going to boost the unemployment numbers and also kind of reign in spending. People had to take that into account when making investment decisions and certainly looking at what the rates picture was going to be.
March brought us a better understanding of quantum computing.
Gained some legitimacy in March especially because Nvidia held its first ever quantum day during its GTC conference in March. So that put quantum computing and quantum computing stocks in the headlines.
Who can forget liberation day in April.
In the end we got basically a market that was selling off because it just felt like suddenly, as some argued, it’s a tax on consumers. Some argued it’s a tax on companies. Some said that even if the other countries eat the tariffs, that it’s going to reduce trade demand for goods abroad.
That article with the simple headline, “Trump announces tariffs” garnered more than a thousand comments.
In May, the bond market spoke up and Kim says this was a build up from liberation day.
The bond market said alright we’ve had enough. We kind of need some more clarity on this and rates began to shoot higher.
And it caught Trump’s attention.
That got his attention and that kind of led to the TACO Tuesday trade of the Trump Always Chickens Out acronym that was floating around. Also at that time, changing and pulling back on tariffs because the bond market was reacting so aggressively and so you had basically the bond yields calling the tune for stocks for a lot of May.
Just as the heat of the summer was kicking in…June gave birth to a very public breakup between President Trump and Elon Musk.
What you had was Musk getting upset about the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and what he saw was a ballooning fiscal deficit that was the total antithesis of what he was trying to do with DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.
Nuclear was the name of the game in the month of July.
Well this is a trade that Seeking Alpha subscribers have been really interested in throughout the year and this was a big month for it.
The Trump administration changed the government’s position on renewables and also loosened regulations for nuclear power plants to be built.
Suddenly these companies are going to be able to operate in a much easier regulatory environment and build more reactors. That’s going to make more money for them and it’s going to help the shareholders.
In August, President Trump moved to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook but the Supreme Court is allowing her to remain in her position pending any legal arguments.
It was a test of whether Trump could just kind of muscle someone out of the Federal Reserve by posting on Truth Social.
The Lisa Cook story has 932 comments.
In September a judge ruled that Google was not required to sell Chrome.
But by October everyone was talking about the government shutdown which ended up being the longest in US history.
The shutdown also meant the closure of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. No jobs report or even CPI.
It was an unprecedented time for the markets. A very interesting one of people suddenly letting corporate news drive the market narrative a lot more. When you didn’t have any of these major economic indicators in the morning, suddenly the early morning earnings and other news would drive market sentiment. So it was a bit of a different picture.
In November Michael Burry shut down his hedge fund and in December President Trump signed an executive order rescheduling marijuana.
People were buying up these stocks hand over fist leading into that and then you had this kind of sell the news reaction. There was a little hope that he might go even further and actually legalize cannabis in the United States.
There you have it from January to December, the top stories that you could not stop talking about on Seeking Alpha.
I wonder what 2026 will bring.
If you’re interested in the Top Stocks of 2026. I’ll leave a link so that you can register for our webinar coming up on the 6th of January with our VP of Quantitative Strategy, Steven Cress.
As a reminder, the market is open regular hours today. The bond market closes at 2pm.
Tomorrow is a holiday so no Wall Street Breakfast which means we’ll be back on Friday.
Thanks so much for listening in 2025. I’ll see you again next year.