Gold and global shares top podium in 2025
January 2026
Gold delivered an Olympic-like performance over the final months of 2025 to complement strong gains from shares in a range of global stockmarkets. The bumper gains helped underpin another good year for investors with diversified portfolios.
The price of gold rose by 64.7% over the course of 2025 to outperform other asset classes by a large margin. Gold is considered a safe haven by investors and its price rise really kicked into gear in September as fears of overpriced sharemarkets, a weaker U.S. dollar and geopolitics drove more people to buy the precious metal.
Queues outside gold exchanges, like ABC Bullion in Sydney’s Martin Place, grew ever longer as the price of gold peaked at A$68101 before finishing December at A$64172 per ounce.
The downturn in the greenback favoured both emerging sharemarkets and major sharemarkets outside the U.S. – they finished as the second and third best performing asset classes for the year by returning 24.01%3 and 18.65%4 respectively.
Artificial intelligence (AI) chip makers, like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung and SK Hynix out of Korea, led the gains in emerging sharemarkets.
The bumper gains for AI shares everywhere came despite concerns early in 2025 that Chinese AI company DeepSeek and U.S. tariffs would at least temporarily derail their performance.
The gains from global shares slowed to 3.5%5 in the final quarter as investors took profits from big technology companies off the table. This was especially true for Nvidia as shareholders got the jitters before the company’s December earnings update.
Closer to home
The top 300 Australian shares (as measured by the S&P/ASX 300 index) posted a resilient 10.66%6 gain in 2025, despite lagging the growth in offshore markets.
Investors who rotated out of U.S. technology stocks and moved into local materials stocks such as miners found a nice tailwind on the Australian bourse as the year came to a close. Increases in lithium and gold prices meant that shares like IGO and Pilbara Minerals (lithium) and Northern Star Resources and Evolution Mining (gold) recorded impressive gains.
Australian smaller companies extended their run in the final quarter to cap a strong year for the S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries index – outstripping the S&P/ASX 300 in 2025 with a double-digit gain of 24.96%7.
Meanwhile, fixed income holdings in the typical diversified portfolio lost value in the December quarter. Bond yields rose in both Australia and the U.S. – which meant the capital value of bonds fell. However, the decline was not sufficient to fully unwind the annual gain of 3.17%8 for local bonds and 4.42%[9 for global bonds in 2025.
1 Live Gold Price Australia | ABC Bullion
2 Live Gold Price Australia | ABC Bullion
3 MSCI EM NR AUD for the 2025 period
4 MSCI World ex-Aus NR Hedge AUD (hedged) for the 2025 period
5 MSCI World ex-Aus hedged for Q4 period
6S&P/ASX300 for the 2025 period
7 S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries Index for the 2025 period
8 Bloomberg AusBond Composite 0+Y TR AUD for 2025
9 Bloomberg Global Aggregate TR Hdg AUD for 2025
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