January 2025
As the editors of The Free Press noted on December 21, 2024, “The past year has been marked by wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine, a presidential election, Peanut the Squirrel, the resignation of the president of Harvard, a solar eclipse, a disastrous hurricane in North Carolina, the launch of Starship, the Summer Olympics, the release of Evan Gershkovich, the death of Alexei Navalny, the fall of the Assad regime, a leap forward in generative AI, a coup in Bolivia, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, the murder of a healthcare CEO, and suspicious drones in our skies.”
Despite all this upheaval, stock markets enjoyed surprisingly large gains, even if not as positive as the headlines indicated. The S&P 500 index gained 25% in 2024, though the Magnificent 7 stocks (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla) provided 53.7% of the return. The other 493 S&P 500 stocks went up by just 11.58%.