2025: A Masterclass in Tuning Out the Noise
If you felt like 2025 was an exhausting year to be an investor, you weren’t alone. Between tariff announcements, government shutdowns, and the 24/7 news cycle constantly reminding us the sky might be falling, it would have been easy to throw in the towel and move everything to cash.
If you did, you would have missed out on a pretty fantastic year!
Let’s Recap the Chaos
Take a look at what we lived through in 2025:
January/February
- Trump became the 47th U.S. President and immediately started imposing broad tariffs
- Equity markets responded with significant volatility
March/April
- U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade war tensions got worse
- April 2 “Liberation Day” followed by a brief tariff pause see-sawed markets
May/June
- A 90-day pause in U.S.-China tariff escalation (whiplash)
- Middle East tensions caused energy prices to spike
July/August
- The U.K. stock market hit an all-time high
- The Federal Reserve held rates steady despite mixed inflation data
- Job growth slowed in the U.S.
- Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement (this one’s for my wife)
September/October
- The Federal Reserve cut rates twice
- The U.S. government shut down in late September
November/December
- The Federal Reserve made its third rate cut of 2025
- The government ended its six-week shutdown in November
If someone told you in January 2025 we’d see multiple government shutdowns, ongoing trade wars, and constant policy uncertainty, would you have predicted a 17%+ gain for U.S. stocks? Probably not. Markets don’t move long-term based on whether the news is good or bad. They move based on corporate earnings, economic fundamentals, and the collective expectations of millions of investors worldwide.
For the New Year
We’re barely two weeks into 2026, and we’ve already got our share of attention-grabbing headlines. It’s going to be tempting to react to every piece of breaking news, every market swing, every analyst prediction about what’s coming next.
But 2025 taught us an important lesson. Investment success has little to do with the ability to predict markets and everything to do with the ability to stick to the plan.
We don’t know what 2026 will bring. We don’t know which headlines will dominate the news or which events will cause temporary market jitters. What we do know is that trying to predict and react to all of it is a losing game. Time in the market is a time-tested approach to successful investing, and diversification across stocks and bonds can provide long-term benefits. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, “today’s headlines and tomorrow’s reality are seldom the same”.
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