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NEWS
The Market Clock Strikes Midnight

And with that, the 2024 season comes to a close. The market ended another strong year on a weak note, with the major indexes continuing to feel the pressure of weakening breadth under the surface. With oddly-timed holidays breaking up the trading week, many are eying January 6th as the first major trading day of 2025. 👀

Today's issue covers how various assets did in 2024, the latest speculative small-caps surging, and an opportunity to share your top ideas heading into 2025. 📰

Here’s the S&P 500 heatmap. 6 of 11 sectors closed green, with energy (+1.31%) leading and technology (-0.83%) lagging.

And here are the closing prices: 

Most bullish/bearish symbols on Stocktwits at the close: 📈 $ONCO, $CMCT, $SEAT, $VSTM, $APM 📉 $GETY, $HE, $COIN, $SOS, $DNMR*

*If you’re a business and want to access this data via our API, email us.

STOCKS
A Quick Recap Of Winners & Losers 👀 

We’ll do a full recap of how the market performed in 2024 once everyone’s back from the holidays. But for now, here are two charts that sum things up pretty well.

Starting with a breakdown of the major asset classes, cocoa blew everything away this year, soaring nearly 900% following a mix of bad weather patterns combined with speculators bidding up prices. Coffee and orange juice also posted massive gains due to similar market conditions, moving breakfast from “the most important meal of the day” to the “most important trade of the year.” 😅 

Outside of that, it was a strong year for precious metals, with gold and silver topping the charts, inching out equities in the U.S. and globally. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was another big winner, with the large-cap U.S. indexes following closely behind. The true losers were foreign currencies, certain commodities, and bonds, to a lesser extent.

Moving into U.S. equities, “Magnificent Seven” stock performance was massive this year, with an ETF tracking those stocks up 64%. Every sector closed green, with the equal-weight S&P 500 also returning nearly 13% and showing a broadening of participation through most of the year, up until recently. 🤖 

Cyclicals and more aggressive market sectors led, with the exception of utilities. Although utilities are typically viewed as a defensive, interest-rate-sensitive sector, they caught a bid this year as nuclear energy and the power needs of the tech and AI industries renewed interest in the space. ⚡️ 

Overall, it’s been a historically strong two years since the 2022 bear market ended, and investors are positioning for further gains into 2025. Notably, the S&P 500 posted back-to-back gains of over 20% for the first time since ‘97 and ‘98.

This year-end weakness is causing some to question what could potentially take the bull run off course next year, but for the majority of Wall Street and Main Street, dips continued to be viewed as buying opportunities. Time will tell if we’re all right. 🤷 

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