After a week of fluctuations, the US stock market closed on Friday with a strong performance from tech stocks, while the precious metals market showcased silver crushing gold. The foreign exchange and commodity sectors exhibited a stark contrast. The global capital market in 2025, amid political turmoil, industrial transformation, and intertwined monetary policies, is facing an unprecedented differentiation of asset values.
The tech stocks' counterattack has become the core driving force for reversing the downturn in the US stock market. Micron's extremely optimistic earnings forecast not only ignited market confidence in the memory chip industry but also reactivated investors' expectations for the AI sector. The AI field, previously questioned for its high valuation, has returned to the spotlight due to the realization of industry fundamentals. The rally of tech giants directly offset the poor performance of consumer stocks, demonstrating the core anchoring role of the tech industry in the capital market. This trend confirms that the development of the AI industry is not merely a concept hype but a real trend backed by performance, making tech stocks the key for the US stock market to maintain stability amidst fluctuations.
The performance of the precious metals market is even more dramatic, with silver's rise completely outpacing gold, becoming the 'star player' in commodities for 2025. Spot silver has broken through the $67 mark, with a year-to-date increase of over 130%, and its continuous four-week rise contrasts sharply with gold's stable two-week rise. Silver's strength comes from its dual characteristics of risk aversion and industrial attributes—against the backdrop of global geopolitical tensions and escalating trade wars, risk aversion drives up the valuation of precious metals, while the explosion of new energy and AI industries significantly boosts silver's industrial demand; it is also aided by the rotation of funds towards silver after gold's valuation has reached high levels. In contrast, gold's steady rise relies more on traditional risk aversion logic, temporarily becoming the 'supporting role' to silver in asset rotation.
The anomalies in the foreign exchange market expose the misalignment between monetary policy and market expectations. The Bank of Japan raised interest rates to a 30-year high but failed to salvage the depreciation of the yen, as the dollar continues to break key levels against the yen, reflecting market concerns about the outlook for Japan's economic recovery and relative optimism regarding the Federal Reserve's monetary policy. Meanwhile, the continuous four-week rise of the pound against the dollar and the slight decline of the euro and Australian dollar also reflect the differences between different economies in economic fundamentals and the rhythm of monetary policy, with fluctuations in the foreign exchange market becoming a 'barometer' of the global economic landscape.
Looking at the longer time dimension, the asset performance over the past year has taken differentiation to the extreme. The political turmoil triggered by Trump's return to the White House and the outbreak of the global trade war led to a 9% depreciation of the dollar, while gold achieved its best performance since 1979, and European defense industrial companies saw their values soar by 65% due to geopolitical risks. Meanwhile, the surge in AI and high-risk debt drove a $14 trillion increase in global stock market capitalization, while oil prices fell to nearly a 10-year low and cocoa faced its worst year on record, resulting in serious disparities within commodities.
Behind this asset differentiation lies a collision of multiple logics: industrial transformation (AI, new energy) determines the valuation ceiling of technology and industrial precious metals, geopolitical factors and risk aversion reshape the value of traditional safe-haven assets, while the differences in monetary policy expectations and economic fundamentals dominate the trends of foreign exchange and commodities. For investors, the era of uniform asset appreciation has already come to an end, and accurately grasping industrial trends and geopolitical economic changes has become the core competency to navigate market differentiation.
In the future, the trend of technology stocks will depend on the performance realization speed of the AI industry, the popularity of precious metals will need to observe the continuity of geopolitical risks and industrial demand, while the differentiation of foreign exchange and commodities will still revolve around global monetary policy and the pace of economic recovery. In this wave of asset reconstruction, only by closely following the pulse of industry and the times can one find certain opportunities in a differentiated market.
