2025 Preview Recap + What’s Coming Next

A recap of my 2025 preview + a look at some of what I have coming for the rest of 2025 and 2026.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to do a quick recap of my 2025 preview to highlight what went right and what didn’t. I know we’re not at the end of 2025 yet but I want you to have context for what I’m planning for the end of this year and early 2026.

At the end of each year-the start of the next, I publish a year ahead preview where I walk through my micro and macro expectations for the coming year, key themes and focus areas, a basket of names I think can outperform, and more.

The 2025 preview was a big success. I’ll drop it below so you can reread it and see how it played out. It will also give you a sense of what I have planned for the 2026 preview. This time, the preview will be posted exclusively here on Substack for subscribers and will go much more in depth than last year’s. I didn’t have a Substack last year so I couldn’t provide the depth and analysis I would’ve liked, but that changes this year.

I also want to quickly touch on a few primer pieces I’m working on. If you missed my energy article, I’ll link it here. So far it has aged really well. Shortly after I published it, Jensen Huang of Nvidia said “Energy is the bottleneck of AI,” and since then many energy names have taken off. I discussed which names I own from this group in that article as well.

The next three primers coming up are:

1. Robotics (next week)

2. Solar

3. Batteries

I think these three themes are going to be massive so they deserve their own in depth write ups.

I also wanted to quickly mention that Substack has a subscriber chat feature, I’m in the chat all day talking about the market, different stocks, etc. I suggest checking it out!

Below I’ll attach the 2025 preview for you to review. I’ll also link it here. I’m going to go through it line by line and break down what I got right and what I missed.

Let’s get into it.

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The 2025 preview.

This is a very long read so feel free scroll past if you don’t want to take a few minutes.

2024 was a great year, if I had to grade myself I’d give a B+. Only because I think I could’ve been even better, I sold some of the biggest winners of the year far too early. I identified potential runners and themes very early but also sold those same runners very early. A clear area of improvement for me is to hold for bigger picture moves. Instead of selling for 70% gains I could’ve sold for hundreds of % gains on names like $RKLB $IONQ $OKLO and a few others.

Enough of 2024, let’s get to 2025.

I don’t think 2025 is going to be as good as 2024. No I don’t see a crash like 2022 but I do think we get weaker returns. QQQ was +30% and $SPY was +26%, these types of years are rare. So far, this remains true. QQQ is +21% and SPY is +17%. I will update this at the end of the year but for now, this year has not been as strong as last year.

2 stats:

-The last time we had back to back years of 25% gains on the S&P500 like we did in 2023 and 2024 was 1997 and 1998. The next year in 1999 we had +20% gains. It looks like the S&P500 is setting up for 15-20% gains this year which is relatively similar to what we saw the last time this happened 1997-1999;

-6 of last 7 first years of new Republican president terms were red, the one outlier was Trump’s first year. Trump’s second “first term” (this year) was also green, the second outlier.

With that said, do I expect an up year? Yes, but more volatile than what we’ve seen this year. If we matched the 2024 year return in 2025 $SPY would be near 750. I personally don’t see that happening. I definitely expect volatility to ramp higher, I’m expecting a 10% or more pullback to occur sometime in H1. Trump is volatile and creates headlines, I’m sure his first few months as president will be filled with Tariff talk, ruffling of feathers, etc. which all create volatility and uncertainty. I’d view this as an opportunity to add to the best/leading names. This was very accurate. We had an up year, but much more volatile than we saw in 2024. We had a 10% or more pullback in H1, it was actually closer to 20% and the reason was due to tariffs. His first few months as president were in fact filled with tariff talk, ruffling of feathers, volatility, and uncertainty. It was a fantastic opportunity to add to leading names, which I did! I added to my PLTR TSLA META UBER HOOD positions in my long term account.

The Bottom of The Tariff Crash

We also have a Fed who’s cutting rates and at any sign of unemployment rising will cut rates further and faster. This would act as a major tailwind for equities. I think rate cut estimates are too low, I’m thinking 4+. This was wrong so far… it looks like we’re going to get 3 cuts instead of the 4+ I anticipated. I was correct that signs of the labor market getting worse would trigger more rate cuts… we likely wouldn’t of had any if the labor market stabilized, but over the last few months it’s gotten a bit shaky.

On the other hand we have stocks and, yields rising, the 10Y seems to be dancing around 4-5%, TLT is at lows, and DXY/the dollar is strengthening. This isn’t sustainable, something needs to change and I think it comes soon. Stocks have to go down or yields/the dollar have to go down. Yields will drop in my opinion. Yields came down over 20% since the start of this year, and stocks went higher. This was my expectation coming into the year but I did expect yields to be even lower than they are now.

Two themes that I’ve discussed recently:

Batteries. These will power the future technological advancements we have whether it’s robots, EVTOL, ARVR headsets, etc. I think this theme is in its infancy. Lithium would be a beneficiary as well. Batteries and Lithium took off this year. The lithium ETF LIT is +55% at the time of writing this article and many battery names such as AMPX +330%, QS +131%, SLDP +160% have had stellar years up to this point. Lithium names such as ALB +38%, LAC +78%, SQM +70%, and others have performed very well.

Robotics. This is the real world hardware application of AI, we already have companies such as Tesla, Figure, etc. making major progress. I think we see a breakthrough/ChatGPT moment in 25. Robotics took off slightly, but not the ChatGPT moment I expected. Robotics stocks such as RR +94%, SYM +153%, TER +53%, amongst others have had great years. I will touch more on robotics in my robotics primer next week.

Bitcoin:

I also expect dips in Bitcoin to be bought. Anything around the $70-80K breakout area is an easy buy in my opinion. The low of Bitcoin was right around $70,000 in April and it was bought + recovered all the way to $120,000+.

Non Consensus ideas:

Consensus was Biden would be good for Solar and China. It was actually the opposite, both sectors performed pretty awful. Maybe these 2 outperform in 2025? I really like $FSLR from the solar group. This might be my favorite call of this preview because it was so non consensus… everyone thought Trump would be negative for China and Solar. Wrong. KWEB +30%, BABA +85%, BIDU +43%, BILI +50%, and many other Chinese stocks outperformed. Solar was another group that did excellent. The Solar ETF TAN is +37%, FSLR +39%, RUN +70%, SEDG +116%, NXT +120%, and many others in the solar group performed exceptionally well.

Energy:

I expect names like $XOM $CVX etc. to do well. Trump wants to drill and increase oil production which in theory is bearish but I think these names will actually benefit from increased production and relaxed regulation. Earnings should go higher over the next few years. This was wrong, I think I was a year or so early… XLE underpeformed and is currently +6% YTD. XOM is +10%, and CVX +3%

M&A:

I expect buyout activity to ramp and Lina Khan to be replaced, I’ll post my M&A watchlist soon. This was also wrong. We did not see an increase in buyout activity.. there were a few buyouts such as Wiz and Juniper but not like I was anticipating. I do think there is potential for this to be a theme of 2026, however. Many software stocks have been decimated and have yet to recover.

Now for my 2025 individual stock ideas.

My 2024 list was as follows:

$ZM $PTON $RKLB $SE $BTC $COIN $ADSK $SNOW $UBER $DDOG $AMZN

This group collectively outperformed the market significantly in 2024.

Now for the 2025 list.

Nine mid-larger caps:

$UBER $HON $KTOS $SQ $SONY $COIN $TTWO $TEM $NBIS

Five smaller caps:

$EOSE $ENVX $OUST $AEHR $HNST

Two “Sci-Fi” names:

$ACHR $OKLO

That’s 16. I think this basket does well over the next year.

This basket performed exceptionally well. It captured many of the hottest themes from nuclear, to datacenters, to drones, to batteries, to AI healthcare. There were a few duds but that is to be expected when you’re picking 16 names. 11 winners and 5 losers is solid. The YTD performance of this basket was +80.7% vs. +14.5% for the S&P500.

OKLO +409%
NBIS +229%
KTOS +193%
EOSE +182%
TEM +125%
OUST +109%
AEHR +54%
UBER +43%
SONY +39%
TTWO +35%
COIN +6%
HON -9%
ACHR -9%
ENVX -27%
XYZ -29%
HNST -59%

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This is just a glimpse of what I’ll be releasing later this year during the first weekend of 2026. The upcoming preview will be far more detailed, with deeper analysis and a broader range of insights. I have a lot planned for 2026 and I’ll share discuss more as we get into the new year

I’m still fine tuning the cadence and overall structure of this Substack but one thing won’t change: you will continue to get full access to my trading + investing ideas, sector-thematic primers, charts, market analysis, stock commentary, education, watchlists, and more.

Have a great evening!