2025 in investment markets: big hits and near misses

President Trump’s announcement of Liberation Day tariffs on US trading partners on 2 April sparked a sharp drop in markets, followed by a rapid rebound. Investors had been uneasy about policy uncertainty in the US, but when markets recovered after tariffs were suspended for 90 days, that set the tone for the cautious optimism that prevailed for much of the year.

Equities were not the only winners, with gold prices soaring, bond yields rising to unexpected highs while pushing up borrowing costs for businesses, and emerging markets growing strongly.

The boom in AI saw NVIDIA, technology mega-caps and AI-linked supplier valuations rise. Oracle rallied 35% in a day on 10 September – the largest single-day move ever for a business of its size.

And a tepid response to NVIDIA’s solid recent results has investors wondering if high tech share prices are on the wane and cryptocurrency prices fell after peaking in October.

Closer to home, interest rates remained higher than expected, with a further rate cut from the Reserve Bank of Australia now considered unlikely.

Australian stocks lagged global markets this year but smaller Australian companies out-performed expectations.

What a year we’ve experienced at CFS, with more than $170 billion** entrusted to our care by our customers across almost a million investment, super and pension accounts.

That followed partnerships with alternative fixed income specialists Fortlake Asset Management and global infrastructure specialist Cohen & Steers last year.

And we enhanced the digital experience for our investment customers, including making personalised percentage and dollar returns available via our mobile app.

A testament to our Investment team’s ability to achieve outstanding performance despite uncertain conditions, CFS achieved double-digit returns for the third year in a row for our MySuper Lifestage 1975-79 growth and MySuper Lifestage 1965-69 balanced options*.

And we were ranked No.1 by independent research house Chant West for delivering the strongest MySuper investment performance over 1, 3 and 5 years for our Lifestage series, aggregated across all age groups^.

Now as 2025 draws to a close, we want to thank you for trusting CFS to invest your money. Have a safe and happy holiday period. We’ll leave you with some holiday reading – here are some of your most read articles from the year that was.

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