The Hold Report – Details, episodes & analysis

Tue, Dec 30, 2025

The year is closing with a reversal no one saw coming. General Motors is hitting all-time highs, up 55% for 2025 – its best performance since emerging from bankruptcy in 2009. Five straight months of gains. Aggressive buybacks, consistent earnings beats, and looser emissions standards under Trump. Tesla, the stock that was supposed to represent the future, is up just 17%.

The market spent all year betting on artificial intelligence and data centers. It's ending with Detroit beating Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure bets keep stacking. SoftBank is buying DigitalBridge for $4 billion. Nvidia completed a $5 billion investment in Intel. Waymo is in funding talks at $100 billion. But the rally that was supposed to validate them has gone quiet on empty volume.

The S&P's 17% gain trails most of the world. Hong Kong's Hang Seng is up 30.6%. Canada's TSX is up 28.3%. Japan's Nikkei is up 26.7%.

The MSCI All Country World Index fell Monday for the first time in eight sessions. The streak broke on the thinnest volume of the year. The S&P 500 drifted down 0.35%. Nvidia fell 1.2%, Tesla 3.3%, Palantir 2.4%. With investors largely done positioning into year-end, what’s left is a market asking itself whether the rally that defined 2025 has anywhere left to go.

If equities look expensive, metals didn’t offer refuge Monday. Silver touched $80 overnight before collapsing 8.7% on raised margin requirements, its worst drop since 2021. Gold fell 4.6%. Both rebounded sharply Tuesday, but the whipsaw exposed how crowded the trade has become.

The dollar has slid 9.5% against major currencies, its steepest decline since 2017. Oil jumped 2.4% to $58 as geopolitics tightened across three fronts.

The year everyone thought was about AI is closing with General Motors at all-time highs and Nvidia dragging indexes lower. Investors quietly profit-take away from crowded bets and lie in wait for the new year.

Two trading days remain.

Mon, Dec 29, 2025

Volodymyr Zelenskyy left Trump Island on Sunday saying Ukraine and the United States had agreed on the military elements of a 20-point peace plan and were 90% of the way to a deal. The remaining 10 percent is the hard part: territory. Any concessions, he said, would require a referendum. "It's their land, not the land of one person. It's the land of our nation."

The meeting came one day after Russian missiles struck Kyiv, and hours after Kyiv struck a Russian oil refinery. Before meeting with Zelenskyy, Donald Trump chatted with Vladimir Putin and emerged from the call claiming that the man bombing Ukraine "wants to see Ukraine succeed." Putin, for his part, continues to demand Ukraine withdraw from the remaining Donbas territories still under Kyiv's control.

American markets are closing 2025 near record highs. The S&P 500 finished Friday at 6,929.94, up 17.8% for the year and marking its third consecutive year of double-digit returns. The dollar tells a different story: the index has fallen about 9.5% against major currencies, its steepest annual decline since 2017. That weakness, driven by Fed rate cuts and tariff-induced volatility earlier in the year, has supercharged commodities priced in greenbacks.

Silver hit $83.62 an ounce early Monday before whipsawing into the mid-$70s and back. Even after the turbulence, the precious metal is up about 180% for the year. Copper surged toward $13,000 a ton in London, its biggest annual gain since 2009. Gold, trading around $4,500, is on track for its best year since 1979.

In Silicon Valley, AI startups have amassed a $150 billion funding cushion. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi called portions of the market a huge, insane bubble, noting that companies worth billions with zero revenue are now commonplace. "Twelve months from now," he predicted, "it'll be much, much, much worse."

The year ends with American equities at highs and the dollar at lows. Peace 90 percent agreed. Silver up 180 percent. Territory contested on every front. The Donbas. The Taiwan Strait. The credit markets. The courtroom. And the same question everywhere: Whose land, and who decides?

Three trading days remain.

Sun, Dec 28, 2025

Volodymyr Zelenskyy meets Donald Trump in Florida today, carrying a 20-point peace framework he says is 90% ready, though he told European leaders that he doesn't expect Russia to budge. The sticking points remain the hardest ones: who controls the Donbas, who manages the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and what security guarantees the West will actually enforce. Zelenskyy has signaled willingness to accept a demilitarized zone, a significant concession. Moscow, for its part, has offered nothing. Russia struck Kyiv with one of the year's longest sustained attacks the day before the talks. Ukraine hit an oil refinery deep inside Russia this morning.

Closer to home, the Caribbean is becoming an American sea. The US Coast Guard is actively pursuing a third Venezuelan oil tanker, the Bella 1, which refused to stop when interdicted last weekend and has been on the run since. Unlike the Skipper and Centuries, both now docked in Texas with their cargoes seized, this vessel made a U-turn and sailed into the Atlantic. The administration is now considering deploying a specialized Maritime Special Response Team to board it by force. Trump's "total and complete blockade" of sanctioned Venezuelan tankers has drawn condemnation from UN human rights experts, who call it a prohibited use of military force. But with 15,000 troops and 11 warships deployed in the region – the largest US naval presence in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis – the administration is betting economic strangulation will succeed where sanctions alone have not. 76 to 80% of Venezuela's oil goes to China. Beijing has condemned the seizures as violations of international law.

The year ends with markets near all-time highs and questions mounting about what supports them. Consumers are spending but not confident. Companies are acquiring but not hiring. The Fed is cutting but can't agree on why.

2026 will show which bubbles hold water.

Sat, Dec 27, 2025

US stocks drifted lower on Friday in thin post-Christmas trading, the S&P 500 slipping 0.03% on well below the usual volume. The index is on track to end the year up 18%, buoyed by deregulation hopes and enthusiasm for AI. But beneath the surface, investors are voting with their feet: active equity mutual funds saw roughly $1 trillion in outflows, the 11th consecutive year of withdrawals and the deepest of the cycle.

Where is the money going? Into commodities. Gold and silver hit fresh records on Friday, with silver surging nearly 8% as amateur investors pile into the trade. Both metals are posting their best annual performance since 1979.

In trade, Mexico has emerged as the unexpected winner of Trump's tariff regime, its exports to the US surging even as duties were designed to punish it. And in the Gulf, old alliances are fraying: Saudi Arabia struck a UAE-backed faction in Yemen on Friday, a sign that American allies are settling their own scores.

The AI buildout that powered this year's rally is straining at the seams. Tech giants have shifted $120 billion in data-center debt off their balance sheets, binding Wall Street to a bet that may or may not pay off. So desperate is the hunger for power that data centers are now turning to aircraft engines—jet turbines bolted onto trailers—to bypass grid connection delays.

Oil fell nearly 3% on Friday. The dollar capped its worst week since June. A winter storm cancelled over 1,000 flights across the Northeast. Dealmaking finished the year near $4.5 trillion, the second-best on record. The year is ending quietly, but 2026 will have questions to answer.

Fri, Dec 26, 2025

Something is shifting beneath the surface of US markets. Banks have added $600 billion in market value this year as investors bet the regulatory regime is about to loosen. Tech billionaires are more than $550 billion richer, with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang climbing the ranks as his company moves to absorb top talent from chip rival Groq via a non-exclusive licensing deal that also brings Groq’s founder and other leaders to Nvidia at a figure reported to be around $20 billion.

But the AI buildout requires creative financing. Tech giants have quietly shifted $120 billion in data-center debt off their balance sheets, binding Wall Street’s fate more tightly to theirs. Commodities are flashing signals too: gold hit a record, and copper topped $12,000 a ton for the first time on tariff anxiety and supply constraints, while the dollar slides in a year defined by tariffs, metals, and a weaker greenback.

Power is consolidating in new places. Family offices have become major power players on Wall Street even as the divide between large and small companies grows starker.

Meanwhile, the administration is tightening the screws, launching an inter-agency review of advanced Nvidia AI chip sales to China, overhauling how the H-1B cap is awarded by replacing the purely random lottery with a weighted selection process, and chasing a sanctioned oil tanker across the Atlantic as it veers toward Venezuela. The year is ending not with resolution, but with a market holding its breath.