In next week’s Shares, we face the unenviable task of getting out our crystal ball and attempting to work out what will happen with the markets in 2025.

This time last year we were doing the same for 2024 and our resulting hit rate is reasonable looking back.

We definitely got some things spot on. We flagged a wave of consolidation in the investment trusts space which has certainly materialised and correctly predicted more incoming M&A for the UK market.

We said growth would outperform value, and that was right, at least judging by the MSCI World Growth index, up 19.3% versus 14.5% for the MSCI World Value index in the year to 31 October. We were also right that AI and the big tech names would continue to lead global equity markets in 2024.

We were too positive on China and, although we flagged the potential appeal of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, we didn’t predict the impact his victory, and the anticipation of him securing a second go at the presidency, would have on the dollar.

Interest rates in general have also remained higher than we and the experts we canvassed thought they would this year.

Trump continues to be the wildcard heading into 2025. Will he introduce the promised tariffs on day one of his presidency, as threatened, or are they just a negotiating tactic? Read next week’s issue to find out the potential implications of an unpredictable policy agenda.

Given some of the uncertainty around the outlook for 2025, it feels like a useful juncture to examine the grouping of funds which look to protect investors’ money – read Martin Gamble’s excellent feature inside to get a feel for the leading capital preservation funds.

Bitcoin has run out of steam of late as it teeters on the edge of hitting the $100,000 mark. However, in a reminder that, as discussed in a recent edition of this column, it is becoming more difficult to ignore, a vote is looming on 10 December at Microsoft (MSFT:NASDAQ) over whether it should follow the likes of Tesla (TSLA:NASDAQ) and MicroStrategy (MSTR) by investing in the digital currency.

The board are opposed, although the proposal had an unsurprising advocate in the form of Michael Saylor, chair of MicroStrategy, which itself owns 2% of all the Bitcoin that will ever be created.

In this week’s issue, Laith Khalaf takes a closer look at cryptocurrency and what two pizzas ordered nearly 15 years ago can tell us about it today. He makes the salient point that, while it is entering the investment mainstream, it is still not used widely as a means of payment.

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