25 Trades for 2025
A Thematic Watchlist for the Next Year
What is this?
Our Approach to the “Year Ahead Outlook”
It’s a bit of a ridiculous premise isn’t it—the “year ahead outlook?”
Just because the number on the end of the calendar changes, one is supposed to have a better idea of what happens over the next twelve months? I don’t know about you, but if I felt strongly that I knew what was going to happen over the next twelve months, I would not wait until December to share it.
As speculators, we spend the majority of our time trying to be right about the future. That tends to be a good thing—efforts spent towards being right (or at least less wrong) tend to be rewarded.
It doesn’t take a long or storied career as an investor to have numerous realizations that you’ve missed something very obvious in hindsight. Our vocational emphasis on accurate forecasting sometimes hurts us more than it helps. Becoming too in-the-weeds — to the point where one stifles the creative process that is a prerequisite to developing differentiated views—is a real risk.
Once a year, we drop all pretense. Just for this exercise our primary focus isn’t being right at the right time. Instead, we look at what’s occurred in the passing year and what might occur in the year ahead. Without any of the pressure surrounding “this has to happen or else I’m wrong,” we find that the ideas tend to more closely approximate the truly unpredictable nature of how things will unfold.
Instead of an “outlook”, we create our Twenty-Something Trades. You can take a look at last years to get a better idea (paywall removed):
The end result is a long list of ideas. Some we think could be real winners, some are preparation for a specific scenario or eventuality, some we simply want to keep on our screen. Our aim is to minimize the risk of intellectual blind spots.
The purpose of this article is to put as many ideas in front of you as possible, in hopes that one of them resonates at some point during the next 12 months. If you think one of these trade ideas is hilariously wrong, GOOD. Don’t keep it to yourself, we could end up forming a great trade from the discussion.
The mantra of “Be Prepared” serves investors well. Let’s say 24 of the trades in the following text don’t materialize. When the conditions come about for that one to work really well, we’ll be more prepared than our counterparties.
Think of this as a thematic watchlist. It’s the end of the year, another absolutely crazy year for that matter.
And that, of course, means we get to prepare to do it all again…but differently.