However, the dominating headlines of 2025 thus far have been US President Donald Trump’s aggressive and unpredictable tariff policies and the emergence of China’s AI model DeepSeek which have thrown the stock market into a world of uncertainty.
The past two years have been characterised by fortified resilience in equity markets, especially with the so-called Magnificent Seven (Mag 7) stocks leading gains. The seven stocks are: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Alphabet is the parent company of Google while Meta owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
These tech stocks were beneficiaries of the booming artificial intelligence (AI) industry evident in the impressive 25% gain on the S&P 500 in 2024. Rarely has the market witnessed such great equity gains and 2025 is likely to bring about sustained gains albeit with less vigour as seen in the unwavering willingness of the US equity market to pump in more capital into the AI sector.
