2025 Crystal Ball: Who Will be the Superstars of Wall Street This Year?

Photo of Natalie Pace by Sunil Rampersad.

2025 Crystal Ball: Who Will be the Superstars of Wall Street This Year?
Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company, lit up Wall Street, this week, with 26% gains since announcing the company’s 4Q 2024 earnings. Is there anything beyond AI, cybersecurity, the Magnificent 7, crypto and gold to get excited about? What about Chinese competition? Will quantum computing breakthrough and reward Tier Zero investors? Will the markets soar or tank?  
 
We’ve been leaning into the Magnificent 7* for years. Bitcoin was our 2024 Investment of the Year. These industries were the rock stars of the last two years, with a 59% 2-year return for the Magnificent 7 and a 5+-fold increase in Bitcoin’s value, from $16,627 to $95,629.
*Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla.

Which investment will be the super performer of Wall Street in 2025? Will Bitcoin and the Magnificent 7 continue to dominate? Will stocks slide or cave in, like they did in 2022 after a spectacular 2021?

Will gold shoot the moon? Can AI, cybersecurity and the Magnificent 7 maintain their expensive equity prices?
Below are the topics we’ll cover in this blog. If you’re interested in updated Stock Report Cards on these industries, email [email protected] with SRC and the industry in the subject line.
 
The Magnificent 7
Artificial Intelligence
Crypto
Cybersecurity
Quantum Computing
EVs
Smart Phones
Gold/Silver
Dr. Copper
The Spring Rally
Macro Economics: What Will Mr. Market Do?
 
And here is more information on each point.
 
The Magnificent 7
The Magnificent 7 truly are spectacular. Many of the companies are leaders of the hottest industries, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud services, quantum computing R&D, smart phones and electric vehicles. These industries are the daily bread of business, which is why they have dominated the returns on Wall Street. Many of the companies have strong sales growth year over year, impressive profit margins and a treasure trove of cash. However, not all companies in the Magnificent 7 are created equal. 2025 could be a year where the Fantastic 5 stay strong, while Apple and Tesla face intense competition, particularly in China. DeepSeek has also raised concerns about the very lofty valuations of Nvidia and other artificial intelligence leaders.
 
The reason why Tesla and Apple might have a more difficult year is that the Chinese have begun to compete in a very meaningful way in smart phones and electric vehicles. Many Chinese products are banned in the United States, but that doesn’t keep them from increasing market share in the world’s largest marketplace – China. Americans don’t have a plethora of electric vehicle options to choose from, like the Chinese consumers do, including very cheap models, as well as fierce competition in the higher end market where Tesla is still a market leader. I’ll discuss this more in the EV section below. The smart phone situation is quite similar. Both Tesla and Apple have just single-digit sales growth, at 2% and 4%, respectively. Meanwhile, all of the other 5 Magnificent 7 companies have double-digit sales growth year over year and industry-leading profit margins.
 
There is one vulnerability of the Magnificent 7. Without exception, these companies are trading at very lofty stock prices. Tesla had just $7.13 billion in net profit in 2024 but sports a $1.08 trillion market value. Nvidia’s net profit was $30 billion. The AI leader’s Wall Street valuation is $3.21 trillion.
 
It’s important to have a slice of large cap growth in our wealth plan, and to consider adding an extra hot slice of a specialized breakthrough technology ETF, such as iShares TECB. Otherwise, we are missing out on the explosive growth of the Magnificent 7. If you already have these holdings, then it might be time to capture gains. If you don’t, be sure to dollar cost average in, so that you are not just buying at an all-time high.
 
Artificial Intelligence
The Western World thought the U.S. had hit the jackpot with its artificial intelligence prowess, until DeepSeek dropped on Jan. 20, 2025. According to Reuters, “DeepSeek's AI Assistant, powered by DeepSeek-V3, has overtaken rival ChatGPT to become the top-rated free application available on Apple's App Store in the United States.” It took less than a week to achieve this.
Nvidia dropped 18% after the DeepSeek news, but has recovered some ground and is currently trading down -14% from its all-time high. Investors are pricing many of the AI companies at valuations that make sense two or three years down the road if American companies continue to dominate, but are exceedingly expensive today. The worry about Chinese companies isn’t just that they can compete, but that they can do so at a fraction of the cost of U.S. business.

Whenever prices get too far afield, the slightest surprise can spark rapid selling. We’ve had a spectacular two years, and many people have forgotten the pain of 2022, when technology stocks tanked.

That’s why it’s very important to have an age-appropriate, properly diversified plan that we rebalance 1-3 times per year. If we have made a lot of gains on Nvidia or another AI company, now is a great time to keep those gains – capture them and trim the slice back to where it should be. Our pie chart system is not based on all or nothing. It’s a simple strategy that manages volatility and helps us to be on the right side of the trade.
 
The iShares ARTY fund is an artificial intelligence and robotics specialized selection of publicly traded companies. It’s not as rich in the Magnificent 7 as TECB is, which is why some investors opt to have both funds as hot slices of their diversified wealth plan. All of the Magnificent 7 companies are leaders in AI. So, if you have a large cap growth fund that is rich in them, you have exposure to the explosive growth of this industry, too.
 
Crypto
Crypto has pulled back from the highs that we saw in January of 2025, when Bitcoin soared to $109,358/coin. As I mentioned in my Safe Haven blog last week, if we follow the history of Bitcoin halving events, the high for Bitcoin could come in late April of this year. (The Spring Rally is also positive for this outcome. Keep reading.)
 
However, we’ve also seen deep Crypto Winters two years after the halving event. This is another example of how the pie chart system, and having a hot slice or two of crypto, and capturing games when our slices become five or six, helps to keep us growing our wealth instead of getting frozen in the Crypto Winters.
One other key tip for Bitcoin and Ethereum is that we can now hold this asset in our IRAs, where we are protected from capital gains taxes. Select your fund company well – one that is well-capitalized, with an excellent credit rating and history of doing business for more than 25-30 years. iShares (owned by Blackrock) has Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs (symbols: IBIT and ETHA).

Cybersecurity
Cloudflare soared 22% after reporting earnings on Feb. 6, 2025 and receiving analyst upgrade upgrades. Sales growth is impressive in almost all of the cybersecurity companies, with the exception of Cisco. At the same time, many are still cash negative and trading at very high valuations.
 
Cybersecurity is so important to online businesses that the blue screen incident with Microsoft and Crowdstrike on July 19, 2024, was just a small blip. Crowdstrike is already back to an all-time high. However, we’re also in a bull market where analysts are recommending outlandish valuations for companies. If the blue screen event had occurred in 2022, when technology stocks were being sold en masse, investors might have abandoned Crowdstrike in droves. It’s a reminder that owning an individual company means that we have to babysit our investment. We must be immune to headlines and base our decisions on a sound and accurate reading of the company’s Stock Report Card and forward outlook. For most of us that is far more work than we can realistically do. (Even analysts limit their coverage to about a dozen companies.) ETFs like IHAK give us exposure to cybersecurity companies without all of the extra work.
 
In the past, individuals used industries like utilities and consumer staples to hedge against a stock market downturn or recession. (Neither of these are forecasted for 2025. However, economists are terrible at forecasting recessions.) Utilities have proven to be a lot more vulnerable today, largely due to a plethora of natural disasters that everyone wants to blame on them. Will cybersecurity prove to be buoyant during troubled times – a better choice than utilities? Just as individuals must have power, companies cannot get rid of this essential expenditure.
 
Having said that, if we already had Cloudflare, Crowdstrike, or IHAK, now (or at the end of April) could be a great time to capture gains (keep that money) and trim our slice back to an age-appropriate, diversified plan.
 
Quantum Computing
Be sure to check out my recent Quantum Computing blog. This is an exciting industry. However, it is very early stage with numerous expensive challenges to sort out before the possibilities can be realized. (A lot of the younger companies are flying very close to the trees, in terms of their liquidity.) Be very careful of investing in Tier 0 opportunities. They can be very expensive lessons. Some may even be pump-and-dump schemes… Whenever anything becomes a buzz word, the scam artists come out of the woodwork.
EVs
Tariffs. Competition. Price Wars. Tesla is a beloved brand worldwide. However, because there are literally hundreds of brands competing in the Chinese marketplace and other markets as well, Tesla has had to lower prices. The net profit for Tesla in 2023 was $15 billion. In 2024, the net profit dropped to just $7.13 billion. As the competition intensifies, the sales of the company could be flat in 2025. Revenue growth was just 2.15% in the 4th quarter of 2024.  

Tesla’s CFO Vaibhav Taneja warned that the company’s topselling Model Y has a new model, which all of the factories are transitioning to making. Taneja warned that “This changeover will result in several weeks of lost production in the quarter. As a result, margins will be impacted due to idle capacity and other ramp-related costs, as is common in any launch but will be overcome as production is ramped. We will be introducing several new products throughout 2025.” With such high valuations (and intense competition), investors can be quick to sell when a weak earnings report shows up. Tesla will announce their 1Q 2025 earnings around April 23, 2025.
 
One trend that we are seeing is that Chinese smartphone leaders are launching their own electric vehicle. Huawei and Xiaomi both have EVs. This seems like a very smart strategy. Will Tesla launch a smart phone to link to its S3XY models? Elon Musk says there is no phone planned, and that Tesla’s plate is full with autonomous driving, robotaxis, humanoid robots, solar and batteries.
 

Photo: Waymo robotaxi. (Google technology in a Jaguar.)

21.4% of Tesla’s sales come from China, which is the #1 EV market, by far. This is down just -1% from 2023. However, tariffs, fierce competition, price wars and a thriving list of Chinese-based EV makers could weigh on Tesla’s growth and margins in 2025.
 
Let me be clear. EVs are still the fastest growing vertical in automobiles, and Tesla’s Model Y is the bestselling vehicle in the world. However, there are numerous headwinds, including all of the ones mentioned above and a consumer wallet that has all of the extra cash drained from it, which steel tariffs could make even worse. This makes a $1.14 trillion market value for the company hard to justify, particularly since we’ve seen the price drop to under $150/share (from today’s $356/share) twice over the past two years.
 
Smart Phones
Apple is another brand that is beloved worldwide. It is also one of the most expensive smart phones. For more than a decade, Samsung was the worldwide smartphone leader by units. Apple regained #1 status in the 4Q of 2024. However, we also saw that the Chinese smartphone makers had explosive sales, including Huawei, which is the company that competes directly with Apple in China.
 
​

Apple’s sales growth has slowed down to just 3.95% year over year. The company lowered prices in January 2025 to compete against Huawei. As you can see in the chart below, China accounts for about 15% of Apple’s sales. In 2023, China accounted for 19% of Apple’s sales.
 

In the past, Apple has been very successful in shutting down competition, including getting Huawei banned in the U.S. and some European countries. However, “This past quarter was particularly remarkable for the largest Chinese smartphone vendors: Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor, Huawei, Lenovo, realme, Transsion, TCL, and ZTE. They achieved a historic milestone as they shipped the highest combined volume ever in a quarter, representing 56% of the global smartphone shipments in Q4,” according to Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for EMEA Client Devices, IDC. Both Samsung and Apple experienced year-over-year declines in device sales and market share in the last quarter of 2024.

Gold/Silver
Gold is at an all-time high and silver is gaining in value. When stocks sink or people lose faith in the dollar, gold tends to benefit. However, the swooning can be far more short-lived than many people realize.
 
I strongly encourage you to read the Safe Haven blog that I published last week about how to do gold and silver in your portfolio. The Cliff Notes of that article are that we want to treat all Safe Haven assets as a hot slice or two of our age-appropriate, diversified wealth plan. Silver is a better value, so you might want to consider a silver trust from a trustworthy and creditworthy fund company, like iShares SLV. 
 
Be careful of all the ads that are so abundant hawking gold IRAs. If you are late to the party to buy some gold, considered dollar cost averaging in.

Dr. Copper
Copper prices are still at all-time highs. The commodity is nicknamed Dr. Copper because this metal is usually the first to drop before a recession occurs. Copper is essential all things in the clean energy movement, including EVs and electricity transmission. However, projects get cut when money becomes tight.
 
We’ve been leaning into a Peruvian ETF, iShares EPU, because Peru is the second largest exporter of copper. (Chile is the first. However, Chile’s copper mines are nationalized.) EPU is trading near a 5-year high with a yield of 5.7%. Again, if your hot slice of Peru or another copper company has become two slices or more, now (or the end of April) is a great time to capture gains and keep that wealth.
The Spring Rally
After the spring rally is an optimum time to do our rebalancing. Outside of the pandemic, which saw stocks drop about 38% in a 1-month period between mid-February and late March, the Spring Rally has been very reliable. 20-year average annualized gains for March and April are a combined 2-month total of 3.18%.

Macro Economics: What Will Mr. Market Do?
Whenever stocks are high, everyone has hopes that prices will just keep going higher and higher. However, economic growth in the US is expected to slow down in 2025 to just 2.1%. There are areas of vulnerability, including commercial real estate, and the financial services companies that loan to them (particularly life insurance companies). Rather than worrying and reading headlines every day (a worrier dies 1000 deaths) why not have an age-appropriate, properly diversified plan that protects us from a market downturn, while allowing us to benefit from the super performance that we’ve seen, particularly in technology? FYI: the gains on Wall Street in 2023 and 2024 were much more robust than was expected. How many people were still spooked by the pandemic and sitting on the sidelines, missing out on a 51% total return in the S&P500? That’s why a winning plan is one where we go with a time-proven strategy and just “stick to our knitting.”

In today’s world, we also need to know what safe because many assets that are being sold as safe, are experiencing losses. Paper losses are not as benign as we are being told. Be sure to read my blog from Jan. 19, 2025, on paper losses.

If we are worried about the economy, rather than just sell everything and move into cash, which would then make us vulnerable to the losses on the safe side, it’s a much better idea to remember that we are still going to need our smart phones, our Word and Excel documents, our Google searches, our cybersecurity, our food, our toilet paper, our Wi-Fi and electricity, and so much more. Instead of selling everything, if we really are worried, consider overweighting a little more safe and acting a little older than we really are.​

Here’s what overweighting safe looks like for a 30-year-old.
​

Here’s what overweighting safe looks like for a 50-year-old. ​

Bottom Line
Stocks are expensive. However, analysts keep setting ever more lofty target prices, which lures investors into believing that buying high will work out. All the assets listed above, with the exception of electric vehicles, American smart phones and quantum computing, are contenders to be included as a hot slice of our age-appropriate, diversified wealth plan. (Be careful of Chinese equities; they are very out of favor at this time with U.S. institutional investors.) If we already own industries that have seen interstellar performance, then we should consider capturing gains to trim the slices back to where they should be. If we neglected to include these opportunities, then it might be a great idea to consider dollar cost averaging into them.
 
If you have not rebalanced your wealth plan recently, or if you have questions about those paper losses, or how to add in the Magnificent 7 and other exciting industries like artificial intelligence, consider joining us at our April 25-27, 2025 Online Financial Freedom Retreat or receiving an unbiased second opinion from me privately in my coaching program. Email [email protected] to learn more.
 
Proper diversification, regular rebalancing and dollar cost averaging are time-proven 21st Century strategies.


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If you’d like an unbiased 2nd opinion on your current wealth plan, email [email protected] for pricing and information.

Join us for our Online Spring Financial Freedom Retreat April 25-27, 2025. Email [email protected] or call 310-430-2397 to learn more. Register by Feb. 28, 2025, to receive the best price. Click for testimonials, pricing, hours & details.

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Natalie Wynne Pace is an Advocate for Sustainability, Financial
Literacy & Women's Empowerment. Natalie is the bestselling author of The ABCs of Money and The Power of 8 Billion: It's Up to Us, and is the co-creator of the Earth Gratitude Project. She has been ranked as a No. 1 stock picker, above over 835 A-list pundits, by an independent tracking agency (TipsTraders). Her book The ABCs of Money remained at or near the #1 Investing Basics e-book on Amazon for over 3 years (in its vertical), with over 120,000 downloads and a mean 5-star ranking. The 6th edition of The ABCs of Money and the 2nd edition of Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is are the most recent releases of these books. Follow her on Instagram. 
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Natalie Pace's easy as a pie chart nest egg strategies earned gains in the last two recessions and have outperformed the bull markets in between. That is why her Investor Educational Retreats, books and private coaching are enthusiastically recommended by Nobel Prize winning economist Gary S. Becker, TD AMERITRADE chairman Joe Moglia, Kay Koplovitz and many Main Street investors who have transformed their lives using her Thrive Budget and investing strategies. Click to view a video testimonial from Nilo Bolden.​​

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Important Disclaimers
Please note: Natalie Pace does not act or operate like a broker. She reports on financial news, and is one of the most trusted sources of financial literacy, education and forensic analysis in the world. Natalie Pace educates and informs individual investors to give investors a competitive edge in their personal decision-making. Any publicly traded companies or funds mentioned by Natalie Pace are not intended to be buy or sell recommendations.

ALWAYS do your research and consult an experienced, reputable financial professional before buying or selling any security, and consider your long-term goals and strategies. Investors should NOT be all in on any asset class or individual stocks. Your retirement plan should reflect a diversified strategy, which has been designed with the assistance of a financial professional who is familiar with your goals, risk tolerance, tax needs and more. The "trading" portion of your portfolio should be a very small part of your investment strategy, and the amount of money you invest into individual companies should never be greater than your experience, wisdom, knowledge and patience.  

Information has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. However, NataliePace.com does not warrant its completeness or accuracy. Opinions constitute our judgment as of the date of this publication and are subject to change without notice. This material is not intended as an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any financial instrument.