Where to invest in 2025? We analyze the winners and losers of 2024

Having finished 2024, the time has come to recapitulate what the best and worst investments during this exercise.

Among the winners are, Firstly, Bitcoin, which has appreciated by a notable 121% throughout the year; secondly, the US growth stocks (companies with strong growth potential), which have provided 33.1% gains; and finally, gold, which has risen 26.7%.

Instead, the red lantern it is flaunted by the US high-duration public debtwhich has experienced losses close to 8.1%. To these setbacks we could also add the depreciation of the euro against the dollar, estimated at 5.5%.

Why these marked divergences? Gold, Bitcoin and Growth Stocks Can Be Considered “Long Duration” Assets: its profit flows are concentrated in the long term and, therefore, are extremely sensitive to interest rate movements.

When interest rates fall (or are expected to fall), the present value of those future flows increases. For this reason, the rate cut undertaken by the Federal Reserve in 2024 and by the European Central Bank in 2024 has played a determining role in the increase in the cost of these assets.

And the euro? Your weakness against the dollar responds precisely to the fact that The ECB has relaxed interest rates more aggressively than the Fed, which makes holding euros against dollars less attractive. The logic is very simple: if the European currency pays lower interest rates than the US currency, investors will prefer to keep their reserves in dollars rather than euros.

The great paradox comes when we observe that long-term US public debt has depreciated despite short-term rate cuts.

The reason is that while short-term rates have fallen in 2024, long-term rates have risen (from 3.9% at the beginning of 2024 to 4.5% at the end). Everything indicates that the bond market does not trust that the Fed will continue lowering rates in the future, especially if the policies of donald trump They end up generating more inflation than expected.

In sum, there is a clash of expectations: Investors in equities, gold and Bitcoin do believe that interest rates will fall in the future; but those in fixed income are more skeptical.

One way or another, then, the combination of winners and losers that we have seen in 2024 will not be repeated in 2025: over the next few months it will be checked whether rates continue to fall (in which case long bonds will revalue) or if they stop to do so (in which case the stock market, Bitcoin and to a lesser extent gold will tend to go down).