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Crypto, AI dreams, and memes: The best stock trades of 2025

Being long crypto-sensitive companies and the nuke-powered AI and data-center trade has worked well.

1/22/25 11:43AM

Goldman Sachs’ curated baskets of thematically aligned stocks offer an interesting way of keeping tabs on the market. So far this year, they’re giving a pretty clear reading on parts of the market that are truly romping: stocks adjacent to crypto, data centers, and the power needed to run them.

As far as individual companies included in these baskets, MicroStrategy — the all-in bet on bitcoin that’s up more than 30% this year — is the most heavily weighted stock in the Bitcoin Sensitive equities basket.

Canadian uranium miner Cameco and modular nuclear-power company Nuscale are some of the bigger names in the Uranium basket. Utility Vistra is the top weighting in Power Up America basket. And the AI Data Center theme is one of biggest gainers on Wednesday following the announcement of a joint venture between Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank to invest some $500 billion in AI-related infrastructure.

Luke Kawa

What the reaction to Google’s potential entry into selling chips tells us about the AI trade

Margins are meant to be attacked, customer quality matters, and focus on the size of the pie.

A 'Google AI' branding is lit up with LED light at their...

Markets are getting more concerned about Oracle’s AI data center debt

The price of insuring against Oracle defaulting on its growing debt load has spike massively since September.

Matt Phillips1h

FINAL BOSS

Inside Pfizer’s reset

ByJ.EdwardMoreno

TueNov 252025

Luke Kawa3h

It sucks to be close to OpenAI right now

There’s a common thread between what’s ailing some different parts of the AI trade right now:

A high-profile relationship with OpenAI is a millstone around your neck. The ChatGPT maker is seemingly getting bested by Google’s Gemini 3 (and knows it) while burning a lot of cash, with no end to the red ink in sight.

Such millstone-afflicted parties include:

Investing conglomerate SoftBank has tumbled 9.9% and 10.8% in its two most recent trading days in Japan. SoftBank is a useful way to express a view on how OpenAI is doing because the Masayoshi Son-led firm is poised to own about 11% of the company, and increases in its valuation have been a big driver of SoftBank’s growth in net income. SoftBank sold its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia in October, likely to finance what it owes OpenAI to build its position in that privately held company.
Oracle has the dubious distinction of getting battered across two different asset classes thanks to OpenAI. Remember: traders loved Oracle’s massive cloud-revenue backlog in the abstract. When the specifics were revealed and much of that sales pipeline was down to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, that was when the stock peaked. More recently, credit default swaps tied to Oracle’s debt have also widened significantly, as the company’s infrastructure build-out is launching to fulfill demand from OpenAI, a customer that’s considered to be significantly less creditworthy.
The AI chip business of Advanced Micro Devices had a major breakthrough in October, securing a deal to sell multiple generations of its flagship GPUs for “tens of billions” in revenue. But... OpenAI was once again the customer. This was quickly followed by a separate announcement that 50,000 of its AI chips would be deployed in data centers run by Oracle starting in the second half of next year, likely de facto representing a further enmeshing of its relationship with OpenAI.
Microsoft has a tighter partnership with and bigger equity position in OpenAI than SoftBank. On the other hand, it also has its own successful core business, which significantly dilutes any OpenAI “signal,” so to speak. It’s the second-worst publicly traded hyperscaler in November, down almost double digits and trailing only Oracle.

Max Knoblauch3h

Ukraine peace talks send oil prices down, boosting major airline stocks

Oil prices are tanking on Tuesday, with West Texas Intermediate crude futures down about 2.8% amid reports that Ukraine has agreed to the framework of a possible peace deal with Russia.

A Kyiv official told Reuters that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy could visit the US to finalize the agreement in the next few days.

When crude falls, airlines tend to take off, and Tuesday’s market movements are sticking to that trend. Shares of major US airlines surged on oil’s price action, with discount carriers JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, and Frontier seeing the largest gains. The remaining members of the big four also rose, with United Airlines, American Airlines, and Delta Air Lines all up as well.