I write regularly about the disconnect between how predictable investors think markets are and how unpredictable they actually are. If I needed concrete examples to make my case, 2025 was a treasure trove. At the beginning of the year, sentiment on important issues was very different than it is today, with many twists and turns along the way.

In January, who’d have thought that the Alberta government and Ottawa would finish the year in a pipeline love-in. And that our Prime Minister, who was previously a world leader in championing sustainability for global businesses, would push harder for fossil fuels than renewables.

On a lighter note, who’d have thought three of the most dominant athletes in the world would be Canadian: swimmer Summer McIntosh, basketball player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and hockey player Connor McDavid.

Who’d have thought MAGA would end up being MEGA, at least from a stock market point of view. European stocks are up more than 30 per cent in U.S. dollars year-to-date compared with the S&P 500 at 15 per cent. In January, U.S. exceptionalism was the topic du jour. Now the conversation is more about how U.S. policy is fuelling China’s ambitions in renewable energy, semi-conductors, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence.

Who’d have thought the stock market would be so good with such little resolution on trade issues and that Canada would be at the head of the pack. Just as surprising is that the S&P/TSX composite index did so well – up 30 per cent including dividends – without the usual stalwarts. The railroads lagged, dividend mainstays BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. had miserable years, as did perennial favourites Constellation Software Inc., Thomson Reuters Corp. and Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. Banks, gold and natural gas led the charge.

Who’d have thought the market for initial public offerings would fail to ignite against such a perfect backdrop. The pickup in IPOs was modest despite raging animal spirits, high public valuations and the desperate need for private equity funds to sell companies.

In 2025, the consensus on AI moved around more than Patrick Mahomes in the pocket. It turned out to be the tale of two halves, with the focus shifting from a desperate need for more computing power – for training generative AI models – to a focus on the financial viability of data centres and where their power is going to come from. Companies investing aggressively in AI were rewarded in the first half and penalized in the second.

Oracle Corp. was one of those. It initially got a boost when it announced it would spend a king’s ransom on AI infrastructure, but more recently has been hammered for the same reason. CoreWeave Inc., a pure play on the data centre buildout, is down almost 60 per cent from its June high.

Conversely, Apple Inc., the anti-AI company, is finishing a great run after lagging behind hyperscalers Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon Inc. for most of the year. But the best AI-related performer was Alphabet, a company derided for ceding its technological leadership. It stumbled out of the gate but now has the best large language model and is by far the stock market winner.

Crypto’s year also had very different halves. Believers were euphoric about the possibilities when the crypto-friendly U.S. President was sworn in. Prices skyrocketed and bitcoin treasury companies, which never made any economic sense, multiplied like rabbits. Strategy Inc., the archetype for the category, was up more than 50 per cent by mid-July, but with bitcoin now in the red for the year, its stock is down 45 per cent since the beginning of the year.

Leading players in the sports betting epidemic, DraftKings Inc. and Flutter Entertainment Plc (which owns FanDuel), also started the year on a roll. More recently, however, they’ve been a bust as growth shifts to the prediction markets, which operate in the more regulatory-friendly environs of finance. What were the odds of that?

The biggest takeaway from 2025 for investors is to be wary of bold pronouncements and confident forecasts about what’s going to happen in 2026. Many, maybe even most, will prove to be wrong, ill-timed or temporary in nature.

I’ll end with a story from Morgan Housel of the Collaborative Fund. In one of his newsletters in 2022, he referenced the night before the D-Day invasion in 1944 when Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing what would happen next. She said, “To be nearly sixty years old and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous, isn’t it?”