<\/p>\n
Photographer: Michael Nagle\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n
(Bloomberg) — Jed Ellerbroek barely slept.<\/p>\n
Most Read from Bloomberg<\/p>\n
It was the evening of Wednesday, April 2, and President Donald Trump had just appeared in the White House Rose Garden, brandishing a large placard with the punitive tariff rates he was slapping on countries around the world. On Wall Street, it quickly sunk in that Trump\u00a0was serious about shattering a global trading system that he said was wired against the US.<\/p>\n
Over dinner with his family and throughout the night \u2014 as Asian markets tumbled, initiating a meltdown that would continue around the globe \u2014 Ellerbroek, a portfolio manager\u00a0at Argent Capital Management, tried to game out what would happen next.<\/p>\n
Photographer: Kent Nishimura\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
When he and his team hunkered down the next morning at their office in St. Louis,\u00a0they sought to work through the implications for their\u00a0stock holdings. As the selloff raged that day, Amazon.com Inc. \u2014 their largest position \u2014 tumbled nearly 10%.<\/p>\n
Like\u00a0investors from Tokyo to New York, Ellerbroek was getting a frantic crash course in navigating what would be an\u00a0unusually volatile year. The S&P 500 Index careened to the cusp of\u00a0a bear market. Then sentiment reversed almost as quickly, unleashing one of the swiftest stock recoveries in decades and sending the benchmark back to new record highs. The overall lesson was that not panicking \u2014 or taking the leap to\u00a0buy\u00a0the dips \u2014 paid off.<\/p>\n
The twists and turns of the US economy and the artificial-intelligence boom both played a role. But much of it could be traced to the White House.<\/p>\n
\u201cVolatility is a feature, not a bug,\u201d Irene Tunkel, chief US equity strategist at BCA Research, said of the Trump administration\u2019s effect on markets. \u201cThis year rewarded people who were very nimble, very humble and were very willing to incorporate new information.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also, she said: \u201cYou had to be brave.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here are some recollections from money managers and strategists about how they navigated the most pivotal market moments of 2025:<\/p>\n
Jan. 27: DeepSeek<\/p>\n
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on Jan. 26 called it \u201cAI\u2019s Sputnik moment.\u201d The rollout of a powerful, seemingly low-cost AI program by DeepSeek, a Chinese upstart, appeared to threaten the foundations of the recent US tech boom. When US markets opened the next day \u2014 a Monday \u2014 Nvidia Corp. shares plunged 17%, erasing nearly $600\u00a0billion from its value\u00a0in the largest wipeout in market history. Semiconductor stocks\u00a0had the worst day since March 2020.<\/p>\n
Nancy Tengler, the head of Laffer Tengler Investments Inc., said her heart raced as she scrolled her phone, trying to catch up with the news\u00a0while in the car on her way\u00a0to CNBC for a television interview. As the\u00a0details\u00a0became clear, she said her reaction was, \u201cThis is an opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Like some others, she was skeptical of DeepSeek, thinking it had low-balled its cost estimates. She struck a bullish tone toward tech stocks in her TV appearance. Her firm snapped up shares of Nvidia\u00a0and other AI favorites.<\/p>\n
It turned out to be a good call. DeepSeek didn\u2019t sound the death-knell of the American approach to AI or\u00a0stanch the flood of big-tech spending to develop the technology. The Nasdaq 100 Index was back at a record high within a month and went on to a 21% gain in 2025. Nvidia is up 40% this year.<\/p>\n
April 2: \u2018Liberation Day\u2019<\/p>\n
Garrett Melson\u2019s first reaction was shock. Then in the coming hours, as markets tumbled and social-media users tried to piece\u00a0together what exactly Trump had just done, the fleeting relief of gallows humor: Trump\u2019s trade war, as was soon caught, had gone so far as to penalize uninhabited\u00a0islands near Antarctica that are populated by\u00a0penguins.<\/p>\n
\u201cWatching a sea of red on your screen, sometimes you have to laugh a little bit,\u201d said Melson, a portfolio strategist at Natixis Investment Managers Solutions.<\/p>\n
It was the biggest two-day jolt to global markets since March 2020, when the pandemic started shutting down the US. It set off days of panicked selling when\u00a0China retaliated, recession fears flared, and Treasuries slid\u00a0\u2014\u00a0breaking from their typical haven role\u00a0\u2014 as\u00a0Trump\u2019s willingness to challenge the global economic order cast doubt on the safety of US government debt.<\/p>\n
In the days after the president\u2019s announcement, Melson worked with his colleagues late into the evening and during\u00a0the weekend running analyses, staring at charts and cranking out commentary for clients. In one portfolio model, the team increased its allocation to US stocks and corporate bonds.<\/p>\n
At Argent, Ellerbroek sent an email to the investment team on April 4. \u201cThis is a scary moment,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIf you made me pick whether we are closer to the start or finish of this episode, I\u2019d probably say start.\u201d Ellerbroek\u00a0stuck to his positions, deciding against snapping up beaten-down stocks because there was simply too much uncertainty.<\/p>\n
Photographer: Michael Nagle\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
Neil Sutherland, a fixed-income investor at Schroder Investment Management,\u00a0and his colleagues started a project to track the fallout. They updated the average US tariff rate on affected countries as Trump kept rolling out new salvos, modeling the asset-price implications and relaying their findings to anxious clients. Eventually, they gave up.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just honestly became meaningless because it would change in the space of five minutes,\u201d Sutherland said. \u201cWe just had to come to realize that it\u2019s a moving target.\u201d<\/p>\n
April 9: The Tariff Pause<\/p>\n
Tunkel, the BCA stock strategist, had taken the day off to hunt for a house in Boca Raton, Florida. It had been a relatively quiet day for stocks, with the S&P 500 drifting sideways. But she stayed tuned to the radio during the three-hour drive from her home in Venice,\u00a0on the Gulf Coast.<\/p>\n
Then, when she\u00a0stopped for lunch and tuned out, the fear that descended on Wall Street days earlier quickly gave way to euphoria. At 1:18\u00a0p.m., after the bond-market selloff raised fears in Washington by pushing interest rates higher, Trump announced he was pausing many of his tariffs for 90 days. The S&P 500\u00a0surged 7% in less than 10 minutes and went on to a 9.5% gain \u2014 its biggest one-day jump since October 2008.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis magnitude of the moves in response to the\u00a0piece of news \u2014 I think this is something that is historical,\u201d Tunkel said. \u201cWe\u2019ll always remember those moments.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jay Woods, the chief market strategist at Freedom Capital Markets, saw the moment firsthand from his perch at the New York Stock Exchange. After the initial roar faded, he prepared to welcome a group of visitors. He was teaching a class in technical analysis at Fordham University. By chance, he had scheduled a field trip for his students to visit.<\/p>\n
By the time they arrived, the Big Board was a sea of green \u2014 nearly everything up, with the so-called fear gauge, the VIX, one of the few exceptions. Alerts rang out constantly from brokers\u2019 desks, including some with the ring of a cash register\u2019s chime.<\/p>\n
The day set up a dynamic that would occur repeatedly over the next several months and came to be known as the TACO trade, short for Trump Always Chickens Out.\u00a0Traders started to discount his worst tariff threats, wagering they were only a negotiating tactic. Selloffs, therefore, were buying opportunities.<\/p>\n
Chase Games, one of Woods\u2019 students, was sucked\u00a0in by the excitement. Visiting the exchange was \u201cobviously a huge dream of mine,\u201d said Games. \u201cI lucked out.\u201d In October, he started working as an intern at Woods\u2019 firm, Freedom Capital.<\/p>\n
June 21: Bombing of Iran<\/p>\n
It was a Saturday evening in New Jersey, and Siebert Financial\u2019s Mark Malek was celebrating his recent birthday when he learned the US had bombed Iran\u2019s nuclear sites, a move that traders feared could\u00a0dangerously escalate the conflicts in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf this is true, my phone is going to ring,\u201d Malek told his family at the French restaurant in Asbury Park. Soon enough it did.<\/p>\n
For all the risks, Malek wagered \u2014\u00a0counterintuitively \u2014 that stocks would rise. The S&P 500 had already pulled back\u00a0recently as traders started fretting about a widening conflict between Israel and Iran. But he thought the US wouldn\u2019t escalate the conflict from there\u00a0and the market\u2019s reaction would ultimately be relief.<\/p>\n
Sure enough, the S&P 500 advanced roughly 1% on Monday \u2014 and then again on Tuesday \u2014 as\u00a0Trump moved toward\u00a0a ceasefire. It went on to end the week at another record high.<\/p>\n
Oct. 10: Crypto Dives<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is going on?\u201d Jeff Dorman thought as crypto markets\u00a0nosedived. Trump had threatened an additional 100% tariff\u00a0on China and traders were dumping risk assets. And Bitcoin, which had recently pushed over $125,000, was sliding as\u00a0leveraged bets\u00a0were unwound.<\/p>\n
Messages on\u00a0Slack piled up at\u00a0Arca, a crypto asset manager where Dorman is chief investment officer. He was at home, but soon he and his team were on a Zoom call. They made a plan to cover short positions by\u00a0snapping up assets that had tumbled.<\/p>\n
In their early days investing together, it would have taken them all night. After years of experience, they\u2019d learned to draw up a plan and leave the execution to their traders. The CIO took stock of the situation, went to bed and \u201cslept like a baby.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Dorman remains\u00a0bullish on\u00a0segments of the crypto sector. Still, the moment, for now, has deflated the euphoria for crypto that swept through markets for much of the year as Trump championed the industry.<\/p>\n
It also has bucked\u00a0the buy-the-dip formula that\u2019s paid off elsewhere in 2025. Bitcoin is heading to its first annual drop since the 2022 crash,\u00a0and other popular cryptocurrencies have tumbled over the past two months. That has hammered crypto-linked shares like the stockpiler Strategy Inc.\u00a0and\u00a0the Trump-family-affiliated American Bitcoin Corp.<\/p>\n
Nov. 21: Year-End \u2018Sigh of Relief\u2019<\/p>\n
It had looked like the retreat from risk was poised to drag down the broader stock market, too, as worries about frothy AI valuations and the Federal Reserve\u2019s rate-cut path\u00a0weighed on\u00a0the S&P 500.<\/p>\n
The worries didn\u2019t last. On Nov. 21, stocks started bouncing back on anticipation that the cooling labor market would prod the Fed to continue easing monetary policy,\u00a0as it did when it met on Dec.\u00a010.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the economy has kept on defying recession fears despite Trump\u2019s trade war, federal-employee\u00a0job cuts and a Congressional standoff that caused a record-long government shutdown. The AI boom, for all the bubble talk, hasn\u2019t turned to bust. And whomever Trump picks to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell next year is seen as likely to back Trump\u2019s push for even faster rate cuts.<\/p>\n
That has sowed a late-year sense of optimism heading into 2026. After this year\u2019s gains stung anybody who stuck to\u00a0bearish calls,\u00a0Wall Street strategists are anticipating that the S&P 500 will rise for a fourth straight year. If they\u2019re right, that would be the longest winning streak in nearly two decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cOverall,\u201d Freedom Capital\u2019s Woods said, \u201cthere\u2019s a sigh of relief that we\u2019ve gotten through some of the biggest waves that were thrown at this market.\u201d<\/p>\n
–With assistance from Olga Kharif, Ye Xie, Carter Johnson, Alexandra Semenova, Michael MacKenzie and Yvonne Yue Li.<\/p>\n
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek<\/p>\n
\u00a92025 Bloomberg L.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photographer: Michael Nagle\/Bloomberg (Bloomberg) — Jed Ellerbroek barely slept. Most Read from Bloomberg It was the evening of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1540,10696,184964,7904,28,101,8360,33189,184963,184962,47675,942,184965,130847,184961],"class_list":["post-377945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-amazon-com-inc","tag-asian-markets","tag-bca-research","tag-bloomberg","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-global-markets","tag-global-trading-system","tag-irene-tunkel","tag-jed-ellerbroek","tag-nancy-tengler","tag-president-donald-trump","tag-schroder-investment-management","tag-stock-holdings","tag-white-house-rose-garden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}