Tale of the tape for 2024

Welcome to a special New Year's edition of Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Breakfast. It's January 1st, and I'm your host, Kim Khan. 2024 on Wall Street is in the books. On the last day of trading, stocks limp to the finish line, with the major averages closing in the red. The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.9%, the S&P 500 lost 0.4%, and the Dow finished barely down.

that made it four straight losing sessions for the S&P to close out the year. Strategist Ryan Detrick at Carson Group notes that it's the longest year end losing streak since 1966, but stocks did gain 20% in 1967. Now for those keeping score at home, here's how the major asset classes performed last year. In stocks, the S&P rose 24% to 58.81, then as that composite gained nearly 31% to finish at 19.310,

and the Dow industrials underperformed, finishing up nearly 13% to $42,544. In the small cap arena, the Russell 2000 added 10% to $2,230. In the bond market, the benchmark 10-year treasury yield added 71 basis points to end the year at 4.58%.

The Fed Fund's rate ended the year at a range of four and a quarter to four and a half percent, following a 50 basis point cut in September and two quarter point cuts in November and December to close out the year. WTI crude oil fell 1.3% to 71.72 per barrel, while gold rallied 24.5% to $2,624 per ounce and silver gained 21.5% to 28.88 per ounce.

And Bitcoin jumped 111.5%, moving into trading in the new year around $94,000. We look next at what seeking office subscribers are expecting for the coming year in stocks. Based on the average from Wall Street Breakfast Sentiment Survey for 2025, the S&P target for next year is 6,241, an upside of just 6%.

But the biggest cohort of respondents, 54%, see the benchmark index climbing at 6,500, which would result in an increase of 10.5% for the year. Stocks are also seen as the best asset class, with four fifths of subscribers putting most of their investing capital there, compared to bonds, commodities, cash, and crypto. In what sparked reader interest this year? AI made way for quantum, but there was room for old favorites like the Fed and Income Stocks and, of course, a love of lists.

The 10 most popular news stories among subscribers were, quantum plays ranked by their seeking alpha-quant rating scores, followed by worse performers that could see a bounce after tax-loss selling. The third place, top dividend picks for 2025, what Wall Street analysts are saying as they catch up to the quantum trade was next, the 25 highest conviction picks for 2025 from UBS followed, then 10 oversold stocks with strong potential, the big December stock sell-off after the Fed rained in easy expectations,

End of the year insider trades was 8th Google CEO telling employees to brace for a challenging 2025 got the 9th month page views and the upshot of Micron's week Q2 outlook came in at 10th. You can check out the links to all 10 in our podcast story on seeking alpha have a happy and prosperous 2025.

That's all for this special Wall Street breakfast. Look for links for stories in the show notes section. Don't forget, these episodes will be up with transcriptions at SeekingAlpha.com. And for a full suite of news, analysis, ratings, and data on stocks and ETFs, go to SeekingAlpha.com slash subscriptions.