Wall Street indexes closed lower on Wednesday, echoing their world counterparts amid light trading on the last day of 2025, while investors took some profits in precious metals as they crossed the finish line of a roller-coaster twelve months.
The three major U.S. stock indexes ended well in negative territory, content to drift along just below record highs and bask in robust, double-digit annual gains.
While all three indexes registered quarterly gains, and the Dow logged a monthly advance, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq posted nominal monthly declines.
"It was a rather tiring year looking back on it, and Liberation Day seems like it was eons ago," said Scott Ladner, chief investment officer at Horizon in Charlotte, North Carolina, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump's April 2 sweeping tariff policy announcement. "It's frankly hard to find an asset class that did poorly outside of the U.S. dollar."
Wednesday's modest moves cap a whipsaw year marked by geopolitical turbulence, on-again, off-again tariff threats, dollar weakness, and ongoing mania surrounding the artificial intelligence boom.
"We think the next two years are going to be about the diffusion of AI capabilities throughout the economy," Ladner added. "Understanding that shift from ‘we've got to build this technology’ to ‘we've got to use this technology’ is going to be one of the most important things we can figure out from an investing and an economic analysis standpoint."
Gold and silver continued to consolidate as investors took advantage of the precious metals' remarkable price jumps this year, with gold hitting a 46-year peak and silver seeing a record annual surge.
Looking to the coming year, investors will seek clues into the U.S. Federal Reserve's path forward on interest rates as the flow of economic data returns to normal in the aftermath of the longest-ever federal government shutdown, with an imminent change of leadership as Jerome Powell nears the end of his stint as Fed Chair.
