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A trader wears “2026” glasses on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
May this year prove as lucrative as 2025, when the S&P 500 rallied 16.39% mostly on the back of enthusiasm over artificial intelligence, though some pockets of the sector (looking at you, Oracle) noticeably weakened as the year drew to a close.
Since U.S. markets have only been open for a day thus far, and most investors and analysts might still be stubbornly nursing their New Year’s Day champagne (maybe I’m just speaking for myself), here’s a round-up of CNBC’s end-of-the-year retrospectives that paint, in broad strokes, what 2025 looked like.
- The prize for the most magnificent of the Magnificent Seven goes to Google-parent Alphabet. Despite shares tumbling 18% in the first quarter, they ended the year up 65%, as investors saw the company’s release of Gemini 3 as a potential competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Here’s to a fruitful year of trading!
What you need to know today
U.S. attacks Venezuela. The military operation, which overthrew and captured the country’s president Nicolas Maduro, was conducted Saturday stateside. A U.S. federal indictment is charging Maduro with a narco-terrorism conspiracy.
Confusion over the future of Venezuela. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday appeared to backtrack on President Donald Trump’s claim that the U.S. will “run” oil-rich Venezuela. Analysts think energy markets should remain steady in the near term.
U.S. stocks wobble Friday. On the first trading day of 2026, the S&P 500 rose 0.19%, but gave up earlier gains of as much as 0.7%.The pan-European Stoxx 600 added 0.67%. Britain’s FTSE 100 broke the 10,000 level during trading, but closed at 9,951.14.
BYD overtakes Tesla as top seller of EVs. The Chinese automaker said Thursday it sold 2.26 million battery-powered cars in 2025, surpassing Tesla’s 1.64 million. It’s a sign of how Chinese EV makers are dominating the market.
[PRO] U.S. labor market data to set the tone. The year kicks off with the U.S. nonfarm payrolls report for December, out Friday, which will provide market watchers the first sign of how the economy has been holding up.
And finally…
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is prepared for launch carrying NASA’s IMAP mission, which will study the boundary of the sun’s heliosphere and other scientific payloads, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Sept. 23, 2025.
Joe Skipper | Reuters
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