2025 Year in Review

Every January, we here at Lucre Advisory take a look back on the year that was. What were the highlights? What were the “lowlights”? What events will we remember? Most importantly, what did we learn? I, then send a Year in Review message to my clients that encapsulates it all. I thought you might be interested in seeing it, too.

When I play back the last twelve months in my head, the theme of 2025, to me, can be summed up by three words, three dates, and three numbers.  Here they are:

Let’s start with the words. Back in December, three of the world’s most popular dictionaries selected their “word of the year.”  Merriam-Webster chose slop, which they define as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”¹

The Oxford Dictionary chose rage bait. Their definition: “Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.” ²

Finally, Dictionary.com selected six-seven (sometimes written as “67” but not to be confused with the number “sixty-seven”). Confused? So’s everybody else. Even the dictionary experts didn’t really know what to make of it, defining it as, “a viral, ambiguous slang term” and describing it as “meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical.” ² In other words, it doesn’t really mean anything.

If you’ve been online at all this year, you’ve likely encountered at least one of these terms. You may have seen AI slop, in the form of fake, low-effort pictures and videos. You’ve likely come across rage bait in the form of an inflammatory Facebook post or fear-mongering news headline. Possibly you’ve seen the various “six-seven” memes that floated around on social media.

Normally, I don’t pay much attention to these “word of the year” choices.  But this time, I was struck by something: When you get right down to it, all three words are about things that are fake.  Not just in the sense that they often represent things that don’t exist, but in the sense that they are almost never, ever, genuine. 

So much of our time is spent trying to detect what is actually real and genuine. The videos we watch, the headlines we see, the information we read.  What is true, what is exaggerated, and what is downright fabrication? Those three words sum up just how much around us, especially on our devices, is fake…and how exhausting and demoralizing it can be to detect them.

Now, what does this all have to do with finance? Well, thinking about it made me realize how much time investors spend doing it, too: Trying to figure out what is genuine and what isn’t. Which leads me to the three dates and three numbers.

Rewind back to the start of 2025. When the year began, investors were in something of a mixed mood: Hopeful about the prospect of cooling inflation, falling interest rates, and lower taxes, but nervous about the possibility of tariffs and a new trade war with China. President Trump had repeatedly threatened a variety of tariffs on China, Canada, Mexico, and other countries. But would he do it? How would other countries respond? What kind of impact would it have? Was it real, exaggerated, or all just a bluff?

Macroeconomics is one of the most difficult things to parse as an investor. The economy and the stock market are not the same, but they can indirectly affect each other. I can still remember the questions that nearly every market commentator was asking: How will tariffs impact inflation? How will inflation influence interest rates? What will interest rates do to consumer spending? How much will spending continue to drive economic growth? Here at Lucre Advisory, we pondered those questions, too. But investors can easily twist themselves into knots trying to figure out what matters and what doesn’t; what is signal and what is just noise.

By February 19, despite a flurry of tariff announcements from the White House, most investors decided to shrug off all the trade war talk as not real. The S&P 500 reached 6,144, its second record high in two days, boosted by the hope that tariffs were more bark than bite.³ It would be the last one for a while.

Fast forward now to April 8. The S&P closed at 4,982, nearly 19% below its high on February 19.³ President Trump’s promise of “Liberation Day” tariffs, a broad and historically high slate of import duties on China, the European Union, and other countries had so spooked investors that the S&P’s value had slid all the way back to where it had been a year prior.

Now investors had to wrestle with a new debate. Is this real? A real bear market, or just a correction? Are these tariffs permanent, or merely temporary? Everywhere you looked, there were headlines, videos, podcasts, and posts with different information, often with titles like “The Markets Are Just Like They Were in 19XX.  Here’s What Experts Think You Should Do Next.” Or “The Last Time the Markets Did X, Y Happened.” What was real? What was exaggerated? What was fake?

And now to our third date: December 26. On this day, the S&P 500 hit its most recent all-time high of 6,945.³ (As of this writing, anyway. That number may be different by the time you read this.) The index later closed the day slightly lower, but for a brief moment, it was up a staggering 39% from where it landed on April 8.

What prompted this incredible turnaround? If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be, “The normalization of things that previously caused uncertainty.” As many of the Liberation Day tariffs were canceled, suspended, or lowered, investors got used to the idea, emotions settled down, and the markets normalized. That enabled investors to turn their attention to other things, like falling interest rates and investments into AI by tech companies.

The end result: 2025 was a fascinating and ultimately highly positive year for stocks.

But what was interesting about December 26 isn’t that the S&P hit an all-time high. That’s a common occurrence in a bull market. What was interesting is that gold also hit an all-time high on the very same day…something that hasn’t occurred since 1975.⁴ Gold is often used as a hedge against stock market volatility, so for both stocks and gold to hit record highs at the same time suggests many investors are feeling cautious about the future despite the stock market’s success. So, now the cycle begins again: What’s real and what isn’t? What’s signal and what’s noise?

All of these questions are difficult enough. But modern investors also have to contend with other distractions. You wouldn’t have to look hard, on any given day, to find hundreds of articles, videos, podcasts, and posts all designed to confuse you. “Invest in X/Don’t invest in Y.” “It’s time to buy/ It’s time to sell.” “Here’s what experts think you should know/Here’s what the experts don’t want you to know.” Some of this can be helpful…but much of it is slop, rage bait, or just plain wrong.

So, confronted with all this confusion, all this noise, what’s an investor to do? This, at last, brings me to what I think is the real theme of 2025. The most important lesson the year can teach us:

What do we know to be real? For my clients, and I imagine for you, too, it’s the dreams and goals they’ve had for years. Those are far more real and significant than anything digital could ever be. By focusing on why we invest – for the places you want to see, skills you want to learn, milestones you want to reach, and the people you want to do it all with – we prioritize the meaningful over the distractive. Distractions like daily market movements or the bewildering deluge of slop and rage bait we get flooded with every day.

For our clients at Lucre Advisory, another is our investment process. A process far more tried and proven than trying to decipher headlines or wrestle with probabilities. By focusing on the process we know to work, we can rely on the principles we know to be real…like diligence, patience, and discipline. That’s why our clients didn’t need to predict everything that would happen in order to have a successful year as investors. In 2025, we just needed to hold to our process.

And of course, there’s the most real thing of all: The people and relationships that bring true meaning to your life. There are so many voices on our phones, TVs, car radios, and social media feeds vying for our attention. But the more we tune them out and focus instead on the people who we know care about us, the more we fill our days with all that is genuine and authentic, the more everything that’s fake, frustrating, and unreliable gets filtered out. Slop, rage bait, it all just…fades away.

And that, to me, is why the real “word of the year” for 2025 isn’t slop, rage bait, or six-seven. It’s meaningfulness.  For the more we hold to that word, the more we prioritize it in thought and deed, the more we will know that we are truly on the right path…to the life we were always meant to live.

So, that’s 2025! I hope it was a wonderful year. On behalf of my entire team, I look forward to making 2026 even better. As always, please let us know if you have any questions, or if we can ever help you and your family the way we help our client families. Have a Happy New Year!

Sources:
¹ “2025 Word of the Year: Slop,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year
² “2025’s Words of the Year, So Far,” Time, https://time.com/7334730/word-of-the-year-2025-cambridge-collins-dictionary-oxford-merriam/
³ “S&P 500 Historical Data,” Investing.com, https://www.investing.com/indices/us-spx-500-historical-data
⁴ “The S&P 500 and Gold Are at Record Highs,” Barrons, https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-122625/card/the-s-p-500-and-gold-are-at-record-highs-that-s-not-supposed-to-happen–Ras47ZC0A5FwZ556upxY