The Best (and Worst) Companies of 2025

Hey there. I am still stuck at home. Not stuck. Stuck's the wrong word. I'm having a great time, but I am going a little stir crazy after over a week here in Arizona at my parents house. I decided I'll do a lighter topic today. I think it's something that's interesting. I kind of went down a rabbit hole on this. Uh what companies did the best and worst stock-wise in 2025. Now, warning, this is not a financial advice reason that I'm doing this. This is not to be like, "Oh, well, this company did good in stock-wise. You should buy it." [laughter] At no point am I here to talk about what you should do with your money. It is more about what I find more interesting, which is when a company's stock price changes so dramatically in a short time period, like one year. It's often because of large narrative shifts. I don't know if you've heard of the idea of the Keynesian beauty contest. This is a regular beauty contest, right? Maybe I tell you, okay, pick who you think is the most beautiful and you for whatever your personal likes and attributes are, write something down. a Keynesian beauty contest is a little different. Now, to be fair to Canes, he's not augling these women because, as I found out by reading his biography, he participated in many, many gay orgies. [laughter] Almost too much of the book Price of Peace is about the gay orgies, not enough about the economics. But I digress. A Keynesian beauty contest is the idea that if I tell you that if you pick the winner of the beauty contest, you get a big prize. Well, then you're not just going to write down who you think is the most beautiful. You're going to try and look around and see who everybody else thinks is the most beautiful. You're basically trying to pick what you think everybody else will pick so that if you get the right one and you pick the winner, you get a prize. That's how the stock market works. We're not just judging each company on which one we think will do well. We're trying to pick what everybody else will think will do well. We're trying to find the narratives and the stories that drive the stock market. Now, at the end of the day, the fundamentals of what the company makes and earns do matter, but as I've mentioned over and over, almost to my own insanity. [music] The stock market has gotten ever more divorced from the fundamentals. We are truly in a storytelling era of the stock market. You know, Tesla is selling fewer cars than last year, yet their stock part prices up largely based on the storytelling on the on the promises on the future. So the storytelling matters and the big winners and the big losers of this year all have new stories that emerged during 2025 that kind of shaped the narrative. Not all will turn out to be true, but that that's what's the going story is right now. So I'll go through a couple of them because I think it's interesting. First of all, the the top, you know, 1 2 3 four companies in the S&P 500, the biggest performers of the year, all four of them. Can you guess what industry? [laughter] It might shock you. It may seem a little boring, but I guess it's relevant. We talked about it recently. Computer memory. SanDisk was the single best performer in the S&P this year, 594% up, followed closely by Western Digital, 300%. Then Micron, 233, then Seagate. This is number 1, 2, 3, and four best performing stocks in the S&P. All four of them deal with computer memory. Now, we did a video on this recently, but the main takeaway is that Sam Alman and the AI industry as a whole walked in with a giant blank check to the memory industry and said, "We want to buy everything you make." [laughter] Like in summation, that's what happened. And so, all of them are, you know, and and they were in a supply constrained period. They didn't have a lot of factories have been shut down. And so, prices went through the roof. As we've talked about, consumer memory has been like extremely price priced out for regular consumers. and almost all of it's going to the AI industry. So, all four of them massive winners. The number five though, right behind them is the probably the company you have open on your phone right now as you're trying to buy memory companies [laughter] and I want you to close it. It's Robin Hood. Okay, Robin Hood has done phenomenally well this year for two main reasons. Number one is that Robin Hood Gold, which is like their subscription service, has grown dramatically. I mean, it's up like 77%. I think they have 4 million paying members. I think it's a bad [laughter] thing to be spending your money on. But retail trading is a frenzy again. Everyone's got stock picks. And uh more important than stock picks is this year they discovered the magic of prediction markets. Now listen, one of the companies I I didn't invest in it personally, but in the stock game I invested in DraftKings because I was like, "Oh man, gambling. This year is going to be degenerate for gambling." And I was correct on that. The one thing I didn't foresee is how so much of the gambling growth wouldn't go to these players like DraftKings and FanDuel. It would go off platform to these prediction markets like Khi or Poly Market. And specifically the one of the big winners here has been Robin Hood. Robin Hood now has billions of daily cumulative sorry they have they have billions of total uh contract volume. So instead of like betting who will win a a sports game, you are making a prediction [laughter] and it's not gambling anymore and it's totally different. And this has been huge. This has been massive. This has been super duper lucrative and uh has been a huge part of Robin Hood's incredible surge this year as the fifth best performing stock in the S&P 500. Again, I'll skip a couple. I'm trying to pick a couple ones that I think are interesting. For example, one of the big stories this year, Warner Brothers Discovery. At the beginning of this year, Warner Brothers Discovery was consider the story, the narrative around it was this is a debt riddled failing Hollywood creaky behemoth that is falling apart is a smores board of crap loaded with debt strapped in a rubber band. But by the end of the year, the story is, wow, this company is the bell of the ball. Everyone's bidding on them. Netflix wants to buy them. Paramount wants to buy them. They're going back and forth for hundreds of billions of dollars. And so the stock market has risen up dramatically in response to these bids. One of them probably will go through and that'll buy the stock at a much higher rate. Again, one of the big stories going into this year was the overperformance of the MAG 7, the big tech stocks [music] in 2024. Now, they've all done relatively well this year, but it hasn't been the gargantuan numbers they had last year. It's been a little more muted. And the story, as with most things in the economy right now, has been around AI. The members of the Mag 7 that can most credibly show AI growth or make or say the word AI enough times have done better. But what's surprising is normally that winner would be Nvidia, but Nvidia actually was not the best performer of the Mag 7 this year. It was Google Alphabet. Maybe you flash back a year, year and a half ago, the story is that uh-oh, Google's getting lapped. Open AI is coming in. The AI revolution is going to kill Google's search monopoly and they're going to be dead. And the story now is that wait a minute, Google has created a really fierce competitor with Gemini and owns YouTube and has all that training data and already has access to your email and maps and and in fact integrating all that with AI is going to make them a superpower. That story shift has caused a ma Google is the best performing mag 7 this year. But it's not just America. You know, one thing I did for this is I look back at like what people were saying at the end of 24 around [music] stocks. One of the big debates was whether the US stock market would continue to outperform because in 2024 the US stock markets vastly outperformed the rest of the world. And people were asking whether or not they should diversify. Well, it turns out the answer was probably yes. Because while the US stock market did quite well this year, 14% gain, nothing to sneeze at. It was actually a low performer [music] and many people diversified out of US stocks into European, UK, Japanese, Chinese stocks. Now, some part of this is a currency exchange. I don't want to get into [laughter] cuz it's boring and it's a lot of the weakening of the dollar to be honest, but there are massive performers in these countries. I did check. So, Japan was the best one on this chart. Best performing stock market. I was like, "All right, interesting. What was the best performing stock in Japan?" So, I looked that up. It was a company called uh Koshia Holdings Corporation. Oh, 500% gain. What do they do? Let me look that up. It's computer memory. [laughter] It's factor. The same damn thing. One very interesting narrative shift this year was around Donald Trump and NATO. This was the year Donald Trump took office and one of his big actions was to send the signal that the US was kind of pulling back from NATO, which has been like the military alliance of the past 60 years, you know, since post World War II. And that shakiness has led a new story to emerge, which is that Europe is going to have to start spending money on their own military to fall out of the US umbrella. That has led to a massive surge in European defense stocks. Now, one in particular, Rhin Metal, you know, big shout out to Dominic on the Marketing Monday team. He called this before it happened and actually made an investment and made good money. This is a German defense company. Germany this year had Friedrich Mertz win the chancellorship and urge a uh a revival of defense spending. Germany would like to be the new weapons manufacturer of Europe. They would like every other European country to stop spending on American contractors and start spending on German ones. And so Rhin metal is surging massively surging. And you can see like this is this is uh the proposed increase in defense spending in Germany the planned 2526. And as that goes up they're going to spend a lot of it on contractors like Ryan metal. a big surge. Uh, but it's not just Rhyme Metal again. There's a there's this um rank rank group up 181% this year that makes tank parts in Germany. There's Babcock. Only the UK would have a defense company called Babcock. Doesn't strike fear, but Babcock International is a UK defense company that is also up 169%. On this idea that all these European nations are going to spend more on defense and they're not going to spend they're going to spend on European contractors. Uh there's a French undersea drone company. They make like submersible drones. I'm not an expert on this, but they make them. They're up. Guess what? 372%. I wish I knew more about undersea submersible drones in France because that's a growth industry. So, a lot of these defense stocks are up. Now, again, this is a story. All of these things I'm saying are the new the new current story that is driving the stock market. But these could change. You know, a lot of this European defense spending [music] is going to run up against the wall of, you know, they they have uh more robust social safety nets and programs than like in America. But in order to increase defense spending, they have to cut spending elsewhere or I guess take on a lot more debt, which is has a problem of its own. And so the rubber's going to meet the road. I mean, if if they do actually start spending more, have to cut other things that could be politically unpopular. So maybe this story doesn't come true. Maybe they end up not doing it. But right now, this is the story. And so it's interesting to follow. One thing that I feel kind of proud of was the gold story. the gold story right now of the idea that central banks are buying more gold, a diversification against the dollar, you know, a general retreat from future inflation. All of these uh gold narratives have become more dominant or mainstream this year and I bought into this about a year ago and it's done quite well for me. But what's very interesting is the followup because after gold has done well this year in the last quarter like basically in December here we've seen a massive massive surge in silver. Now I could do a whole video on silver. I think this is really fascinating and I'd like to talk about it more. But long story short, the silver thing is interesting not just because it's a precious metal which tend to do well when there's fears about inflation and when there's fears about the declining power of the dollar. But it's doing well because there is real industrial demand for silver. Things like solar panels, electric vehicles, a lot of these future forward technologies use silver. And so there's like this surging industrial demand at the same time as there's this precious metal scarcity demand in general. And they're both ramming at the same time to create like this real squeeze in silver that's happened recently. Now it's such an absurd rise that I I would be nervous. [laughter] I again I'm telling you none of this stuff isn't financial advice. I wouldn't buy off any of this. It's just things that have already happened, not plans for the future. And what's interesting is I said in a clip probably eight months ago, I talked about an investor I saw that talked about the cycle of precious metals. He's like, "First gold rises, then silver rises, then gold miners rise, then silver miners rise." And I said it, you know, off-handedly. I said it like kind of like it's interesting. I'm going to buy gold and see what the rest is. But uh he was dead on at least how it's gone so far because it happened exactly in that order. And in fact, silver miners have done disgustingly well. Yeah. I mean, Fresnillo here, which is a silver miner based in Mexico, is up 400%. Again, the miners make extra money because when the when the price of the precious metal is way up and they're just pulling it out of the ground and selling it, it's incredibly profitable. It's like if you went from pulling scuffed Pikachus out of the ground to pulling first edition Charizards, you just make a lot more money. But these are the stocks that have done well, and that's somewhat interesting. But most of these you hear about when a stock when a stock or a gold or any asset class does well, people love to talk about it. But almost more interesting is what's fallen out of favor this year. And one that's kind of near and dear to my heart is marketing. All of these big advertising agencies have quietly had their stocks plummet. Again, one of the worst performing stocks this year, major stocks, was WPP, a major advertising agency, down 56%. Tradeesk is the single worst performing, this is a marketing company, single worst performing company in the S&P 500, down 68%. These companies are being squeezed in two directions. Number one is that they make the bulk of their cash from businesses spending on advertising. You know, small medium-sized businesses. These companies are the first to cut marketing during a downturn. The pressure of tariffs, the pressure of reduced consumer spending, the pressure of an uncertain economy, the first thing these companies cut is their marketing budget. So that's squeezing the bottom line here. And the second thing is, you know, maybe the bigger companies that would normally spend huge amounts with them are [music] dipping their toes into costcutting AI. I've been watching football with my dad. They've been playing this dumbass AI Coca-Cola commercial nonstop. Maybe it's not a real threat at this exact moment, but the story line is, oh, this could really hurt the bottom line of these big marketing [music] agencies. Additionally, speaking of things that I'm connected to, I tried I tried Chipotle. I really did. But this year was the year of the death of the slot bowl. [laughter] Chipotle stock down 36%. Consumers are pulling back from the slot bowl. In 2024, the the stock narrative was that these were fast growing future forward loved by millennials and Gen Z going to make a mint go to the moon. And then this year, people have been cutting back uh either, you know, making food. I mean, recession indicator, I don't know, but they're they're spending less um out to eat, especially at these like mid-tier fast casual restaurants. Chipotle down 36%, that's an ugly bowl. Even worse, Cava down 47%. Even worse, Sweet Green down 78%, total collapse. People are just not shopping at these slot bowl uh companies in the way they used to. Speaking of people kind of trading down, Target terrible year. 27% down. Um, pretty huge underperformance, especially given that Walmart has done quite well. In fact, down 27, up 24. You know, bit of a meme here, but uh the truth is that a lot of Target customers have traded down to Walmart. Target presented itself as a little more upscale, a little more bougie or whatever. People don't want that now. People want affordability. And I actually made a really bad call on Walmart this year. At the beginning of the year, one of my narratives was that people at Walmart were going to trade down to dollar stores, which is something that's happened previously in tougher economic times. What's crazy is that did happen. Walmart consumers, many of them have traded down. But what I didn't expect is that the, you know, middle class, upper middle class consumers would trade down to Walmart and they have a lot of money to spend. So Walmart's actually done quite well. There's an interesting narrative shift this year. Bitcoin, Bitcoin basically flat this year. not not an insane amount of story to tell about this. You know, about a year ago, I made a video called Max Stupid. Have we reached max stupid? Where I just looked around and said, "Damn, [laughter] a lot of the stuff we're investing in is stupid as hell." And one of the the basically the main theme of the back half of that video is that the company Micro Strategy was a gigantic Ponzi scheme. And I can proudly say since that video, this stock is down 47%. One of the worst performers of the year because it is essentially paying someone to buy Bitcoin for you and then give you a little bit of it. [laughter] It is a stupid [ __ ] company. And uh I'm glad that the market has kind of woken up to that. Really, if you watch look at the zoomed out chart, it's like parabolic up, parabolic down. So yeah, pretty funny. Another big L this year was Campbell Soup. As far as I can tell, people should be buying Campbell Soup. And this I I usually hesitate to put so much weight on single events, you know, like one bad commercial or something, but I got to say it seems like this is pretty impactful. This went omega viral. A Campbell executive was caught on tape saying, "Our company's products are highly processed food for poor people and the chicken in them is bioengineered meat." This went insanely now Campbell denies it and they fired him and they but this went insanely viral and it was like really damaged the Campbell brand. Nobody wants to be seen buying something that's like poor people slop [laughter] with fake meat in it. True or not, it is a damaging uh scorch on the brand. Lastly, it's worth mentioning that like the [music] tariffs have had a material impact. Maybe the there is this narrative that the tariffs came and went, nothing changed. I I think the stock market has slowly but surely shown that companies that are most directly impacted things they have to [music] import a lot like Nike, Lululemon, and Deckers, any company that was basically doing a lot of importing has been materially hurt so far because they're afraid to raise prices too much because consumers right now are so price sensitive and ready to flip to a competitor at a moment's notice. So far, these companies have been able to absorb some of the cost cuz they're deeply afraid of of raising prices too much and then consumers switch, but it's just eating up their profitability. And so, yeah, a lot of these companies are getting hurt hard. Wait a minute, one one more ad before I end this video. Uh, this was also a massive year for nuclear stocks. Kamiko up 58%, GE Vernoba up 95%, 252 for Oaklo. And what's interesting is this is a this is absolutely a storybased thing. You know, there's no revenue in any of these companies. They haven't even built anything yet. This is all based on the idea that primarily because of AI data center demand, there's going to be this huge surge of nuclear energy building. I'm very pro- nuclear, but to be fair, these stocks are are kind of crazy. Like this is a story I'm watching pretty closely because even though I uh predicted a huge surge of nuclear interest this year, the amount of money flowing into these stocks is hoping for a buildout that has to happen like on time, on budget, on schedule, and make some money. It's a little skeptical. We'll see. But, uh, interesting. So, look, there's a lot more stories we can go into. And what I'd like is if you know of any interesting massive stock crashes or huge stock increases, especially in foreign markets, that you want to include in the comments, I'll happily read them while I'm driving back from Arizona. I like to hold my phone up in front of the road and just [laughter] just browse stock stuff while I'm driving. It's pretty cool. Uh good driving habit. So, uh yeah, let me know. Talk to you soon. Bye. [music] [music] >> [music]