Rosemeyer Management Group
January 2025 Market Snapshot
January in Review
There’s a saying on Wall Street: ‘As goes January, so goes the year’ After finishing 2024 on a downbeat note, U.S. stocks came roaring back in January. According to a popular indicator known as the “January Barometer,” this could bode well for returns during the balance of 2025. But a busy month for markets ended with a cliffhanger on Friday, exposing worries about the potential blowback to the U.S. economy and financial markets from tariffs expected to be imposed by President Donald Trump on Saturday. The tariff announcement arrived at the close of what some described as a frenetic month for markets. Trump’s inauguration, a short-lived jump in Treasury yields, the first domestic aviation accident in the U.S. in 16 years, and the sudden arrival of Chinese artificial-intelligence model DeepSeek were just some of the highlights. For the month the S&P 500 advanced 2.78%.
| Index | 1 Month | Year-to-Date |
|---|---|---|
| Dow Jones Industrial Average | 4.71% | 4.71% |
| Standard & Poor's 500 Average | 2.78% | 2.78% |
| Russell 2000 (Small Cap Index) | 2.62% | 2.62% |
| Total U.S. Stock Market | 3.10% | 3.10% |
| MSCI ACWI ex USA (Intl. Index) | 4.03% | 4.03% |
| Barclay's U.S. Agg. Bond Index | 0.52% | 0.52% |
Looking Forward: What’s Ahead for Q3 & Beyond
While it’s important to know how the market has behaved over historical cycles, analyzing the current conditions for stocks and the economy matter, too. And crucially, many of the factors that have led to the strong bull run in stocks of late remain intact. What got us here? It is a strong consumer. It is strong incomes. It is strong wages. It’s an economy that is still growing nicely.
While a strong economy is a positive backdrop for stocks, their underlying fundamentals are what tend to drive prices. The big one of those earnings outlooks for companies in the S&P 500 – looks like a green flag, too. Overall, Wall Street estimates large U.S. companies will boost their earnings by 14.4% in 2025, following a 9.9% gain in 2024, according to data from SoFi and LSEG. All of this in a backdrop of Trump’s tariff decisions that also have the possibility of moving markets in a moment’s notice.
On a Personal Note
