Market Stats You Need to See in 2025

Hey, what's up everyone and welcome to the school of personal finance. So, it was only a month ago, even though it feels like a year ago when we had liberation day, April 2nd, and the market went into a complete nose dive right after the announcements. And here we are, May 1st, as I'm making this video, and the market has pretty much gained back all of the losses from the last month. The NASDAQ is even positive. It's about 1% up since April 2nd, which is craziness. So, hopefully you stuck with your investment plan. You didn't make any changes. You had a couple payroll cycles where you actually bought during this dip into your 401k or your retirement accounts, whatever type of plans you hold. Now, going forward, who knows what's going to happen. There's still so much uncertainty out there where we could head right back down if we don't have some announcements, if there aren't some changes on the tariff front. We had a negative GDP print this past quarter for the first time in years. So, recession talk is on the table and everybody is still very uneasy, but this market continues to rally and climb the wall of worry. So, in this video, I'm going to share my screen with you. We're going to look at some charts. We're going to look at performance for a bunch of very popular ETFs, individual stocks, and try to make sense of what's going on in this market and where we go from here. I hope that you find this one helpful. Let's get to it. All right, so this software is called Y Charts, and I use it for all my research to look at different data points, to look at charting going back in history. I could build model portfolios in here. There's so much awesome information. So, you will probably be seeing this in more videos going forward. So, this chart that I wanted to show you is we're going to look at a few different time frames, but I'm starting here from Liberation Day from April 2nd, and this is just the S&P 500. So, now the S&P is up today. This does not take that into consideration here. And again, it's May 1st as I'm making this video. So, we are basically back within half a percent to where we started before Trump made these tariff announcements. And as I start adding more indexes in here, we could see so the Dow Jones we'll add in here. That's still down around 3% right now. The NASDAQ actually is positive even though on the chart it shows that it's down. The NASDAQ is currently up a little bit over 1 and a.5% today. This is the developed market indexes. So you can see for international developed markets, they've been doing well yearto date. We'll look at year-to- date charts as well. But even since April 2nd, you know, they are up close to 4%. Now, this is the Vanguard total bond market index fund. All right, so that is this pink line here and you can see it's been pretty stable through all of this. So, bond funds in general have held their ground, you know, as we had this big decline um in the beginning of the year basically. I mean, the markets were selling off ever since the highs in the middle of February. So, we're still down year to date across the board, but bond funds have been doing pretty well. Well, so if you have a well- diversified portfolio, then bond funds, international funds, they have been holding up the US portion, the US stock portion of your portfolio, which hasn't been performing as well. Russell 2000, so this is going to be your small cap companies. That's really performed the worst out of everything. So that's this brown line. You could see it's still down about 4% since April 2nd. And then we'll throw gold in here as well, which is the green line. And gold has just been a beast all year long. It has been performing awesome. So, since April 2nd, you can see there was an initial decline, but then again, we've been off to the races again. And actually, we've had a little pullback in gold. We're about 5% off the highs just over this past week. So, let's look at a year-to- date chart. So, this is from April 2nd until now. Let's zoom out a little bit and look year to date. So, for year-to- date, gold, the GLD is up over 25%, which is amazing. It was up over 30% and that was just a few days ago. So that was on April 21st. So it's pulled back a little bit since then. And as you can see, the developed markets as well, up a little bit over 12% year-to date. So the Vanguard, the total bond fund is up 3.19% year-to date. Now that's a total return. All of these are total returns. So they include any dividend payments as well, you know, being reinvested into the fund. And you can see the worst performer has been the um the Russell 2000, the small cap index, right? The NASDAQ still down 10% year-to- date. The S&P about 5% and again we're up today. So the NASDAQ is really only down about 7 and a half about 8% year-to- date right now. So let's continue to zoom out because it really is interesting as we look at these numbers. So if we zoom out three years, right, and you could see the performances over here under the value column, you know, you could also see them on the chart, but over the past three years is pretty amazing. Gold has performed the best over the past 3 years. And then the NASDAQ is still in second place even though we've had this big sell-off. So it's still up 45% over the past 3 years. The S&P 500 41%, the Dow 31%, developed markets 35%. Right? this total bond fund 6% over the last 3 years. So investing for growth, you know, it's still been the right move even though we've had this big decline. And that story continues as we zoom out. So if we look at a 5-year period, the story pretty much stays the same. You know, now the S&P 500 is actually the best performer with the NASDAQ, a few percentage points below that, and gold is still up there as well. Uh but as you can see the bond market, the total bond fund is down 3.34% over a 5-year period. Let's look at a 10-year period right here. So for a 10-year period, now the NASDAQ is starting to pull away 288%. So you can see it over here, right? So over the last decade, the NASDAQ 288%. So that is uh that's pretty unbelievable. The S&P 500 220%, right? Gold's still doing well, 167% and the total bond market 16%. Developed market 70% and that's really just been within the last couple of years that it's been doing well. It really has not kept up anywhere near the US stock market. So over the last 10 years having a very well- diversified portfolio, it has not done nearly as well as if you were very concentrated in say the MAG7 or the NASDAQ, the technology companies or even the S&P 500. If you had a lot of bond exposure, a lot of developed market exposure, then your portfolio has not done nearly as well. And there's no way of knowing, right? The past does not represent what's going to happen in the future. So this year, you're happy that you've had developed market exposure and that you've had bond market exposure. But if you've been allocated that way for the past 10 years, then you are not nearly as happy. All right. So here's another interesting chart that I'll quickly show you. Now, this is the MAG 7, the Magnificent 7 compared to the other 493 stocks inside of the S&P 500. And now, if you don't know what the MAG 7 is, right, it's the seven biggest technology companies. So, you have Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Tesla, and Nvidia. Those make up the Mag 7. So, year to date, if you just own the Mag 7, you are down almost 15% year-to date, right? they have not performed well so far here in 2025 and the other 493 stocks are basically flat on the year. So the overall S&P 500 index is down a little bit under 5%. So let's zoom out. Let's go 3 years on this. So over a three-year period, I mean it is a an amazing difference, right? So the S&P 500 has returned 50% over the last three years, but the MAG 7 has really done the heavy lifting. That is up 117 almost 118% over the last 3 years compared to the other 493 stocks which are only up 25%. So now will that be different going forward? Nobody really knows the answer to that. If we look at the year-to- date number again, you can make the argument, you know, that we are having a shift into other sectors of the economy, but technology has just been so strong. The MAG7 has been so strong over these last few years. It's uh it's absolutely insane. Oh, you know, this only goes back as far as January of 23. So, it's really only a 2year and four month period, but uh but pretty amazing, you know, tracking it over that time. All right. And now this is my dashboard in Wired Chart. So, this is the screen that opens up every time I log in. So, as you can see today, Microsoft just came out with earnings yesterday. That stock is up 8.83%. Um, this is my my heatmap chart right here. So, Apple's currently down a little bit today. Broadcom doing pretty well. Um, Nvidia doing pretty well. Meta is up over 5% today. They also had earnings yesterday where they beat across the board. So, what I wanted to show you was if we go to sector ETF watch list. Okay, so this is just a watch list that I created of different sector ETFs like this is a quantum fund. This one is the financials fund. And one thing that's interesting, if we look at one-year total returns, right? And then we have the dividend yield here. And then percent off of all-time high. So uranium, I mean, look at that one. That one, that's one that I follow as well. So one year it's down 10% and it's actually down 81% from its all-time high, which is pretty crazy. Um let's see QQQ that it just follows the NASDAQ. So that's 12% from its all-time highs which has come back a tremendous amount right it was down over 20% from the highs from the February highs of this year and it happened so fast that now we are rebounding from there. The S&P 500 that's you know the spy down about 10% from its all-time highs. Um but over the the last 12 months over a one-year period it is still up just about 12%. Um, this is the Schwab US Dividend ETF. So, now let me just say, you know, none of this is investment advice, right? I'm not recommending any of these funds at all. These are just funds that I watch, stocks that I watch. Just all market data, you know, that I'm keeping my finger on the pulse on that I like to go in here and look at the performance all the time. Um, so let's see what else we have in here. The XLK, that's a technology ETF, you know, the largest holdings in there. It looks similar to the QQQ. It's a little bit different, but uh Apple's the biggest holding in there. Microsoft, Nvidia, Broadcom, you know, big tech companies as well. So that's 13% off of the all-time high, right? Vanguard Growth is a very popular ETF. That one is is up over 15% over the last 12 months. It's 11 almost 12% off its all-time highs. And then over here we have individual stocks. Apple, for example, is still almost 20% off of its all-time high. Right? Airbnb almost 45% off its all-time high. Adobe 46%. Amazon 24%, Broadcom 24%. So, you can see a lot of these companies, especially the MAG 7 companies, you know, they're still off close to 20% from their all-time highs. Alibaba over 60% off its all-time high. Chipotle 27%. Coinbase, right? That's another very volatile stock. Door Dash. So, Alphabet right here, that's a little bit over 20% off of its all-time highs. And again, these all-time highs were not very long ago. They were uh basically in February. Robin Hood. Um, what else do we have here? Micro Strategy. Here's Microsoft 15% off its all-time highs. So, Microsoft, it hasn't been performing all that great these last couple years compared to the other Mag 7 companies, but it did just have a great earnings report and it's up basically 8% today. So maybe that one will start to take off again. Who knows? Nvidia 28% off its all-time high. I mean, that's had such an amazing run over the last few years, and now, you know, it's kind of been put in the shed for uh for the last few months or so. PayPal, 78% off its all-time highs. Reddit, this just recently happened. It's basically down 50% just in the last couple of months. Starbucks as well, 37% off its all-time highs. So these charts I find them uh find them very interesting you know to go through and look at all this data. Um so I will try to go through this in more depth in other videos. We could look at some model portfolios and how they've performed over the past few years like a 9010 portfolio 90% stock 10% bond. We could look at some target date funds in here and how they've performed and what's actually under the hood because so many people own these target date funds inside of their retirement plans, right? because they're just set it and forget it and so easy that people, you know, either you default into a target date fund or basically you choose that because it's so lowmaintenance, right? So, it' be good to see the performance of those what you're actually getting when you buy a target date fund. All right, everyone. That is it for this one. I hope that you found it helpful. Head over to school of personal finance.com. Come join my membership community. We're going to be doing deep dives into the markets, into retirement planning, into how to allocate your retirement funds, getting out of debt. so many different topics that we're going to go through. I'm going to have pre-recorded courses, live webinars, office hours. So, head over there, check it out.