SenesTech (NASDAQ:SNES) stock is flying high on Friday after announcing two successful trials of its new pest control products at poultry facilities.
A brood of chickens at a poultry farm.
Source: Shutterstock
The trials were for ContraPest, a pest control option that works by reducing the fertility rates of rats. The product works by first placing bait traps, and then replacing the bait with ContraPest. This reduces the rat population and also limits the chance of a resurgence from survivors.
Both of the tests of ContraPest took place over the course of several months. Cameras were used to monitor rat activity and track population to determine the effectiveness of the pest control product.
The first test took place at a west coast egg farm. The trial showed a 90% decline in rat activity after a 12-month period. Next up is an east coast pullet farm. It reported an 88% higher pullet survival rate after testing ContraPest.
That second case is especially worth noting as the customer estimated it would save them $400,000 via higher revenue and reduced production costs. This shows that there’s a good reason for farmers to consider the SenesTech product.
Ken Siegel, the CEO of SenesTech, said this about the positive news for SNES stock today.
“While these results were from deployments at poultry facilities, the results are immediately applicable to many other agricultural situations. Anywhere there is grain, there is the potential for rat infestations, and ContraPest is now proven in the field to reduce those infestations, reduce the negative economic impact, and improve overall food security.”
Interest in SNES stock was up following the news today. As a result, more than 54 million shares of the stock had traded as of this writing. That’s a massive increase over its daily average trading volume of roughly 990,000 shares.
SNES stock was up 38.7% as of Friday afternoon.
SenesTech is only one of many hot stocks seeing major movement of late.
Friday trading has been strong for quite a few companies with many of them seeing plenty of growth. Among those names are SuperCom (NASDAQ:SPCB), Clovis Oncology (NASDAQ:CLVS), Atlantic American (NASDAQ:AAME), ZK International (NASDAQ:ZKIN), and Express (NYSE:EXPR). Investors can catch up on all that news below.
S&P 500 has gained 16% in Trump’s first year back in office. How that compares with other presidents.
Isabel Wang
5 min read
Stocks have risen 16% during President Trump’s first year back in office. - MARKETWATCH, GETTY IMAGES
16% in a year — that’s how much the S&P 500 stock index has climbed during President Trump’s first year back in office.
But don’t let that number fool you: The past year has been a dizzying mix of record highs and sudden pullbacks that kept Wall Street on edge — even as investors rushed to buy the dip.
Ever since Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs on April 2, nearly every bout of weakness in the stock market has been met with fresh demand, giving investors a key lesson from 2025: Sweeping policy changes from this administration don’t always translate into lasting change, nor market damage.
Yet while this theme — dubbed the “TACO trade” by some — encourages dip-buying, it may also be leaving investors too complacent about new sources of volatility that could lurk on the horizon in 2026.
As of Friday afternoon, the S&P 500 SPX had advanced nearly 16% since Trump returned to the White House as the 47th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2025. The gain itself isn’t abnormal, though it does sit above the historical median return of 9% for a president’s first year in office since 1929, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
During President Biden’s first year in office, the S&P 500 rose 16.4%. It surged 23.7% in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term. But the stock market put even better first years under President Obama (see table below).
SOURCE: DOW JONES MARKET DATA -
That might come as a surprise to some on Wall Street who expected Trump’s second term in the White House to be extremely favorable for investors.
“Trump’s first year back in office has been the proverbial drinking out of a fire hose, with news flow and information coming at a continual pace,” said Chris Maxey, managing director and chief market strategist at Wealthspire Advisors.
If the past year taught investors anything, it was the importance of staying patient rather than overreacting to every headline, which led to “more mistakes than benefits” in their investment portfolios, he told MarketWatch.
“It did require an enormous amount of patience for investors to not make any reactionary changes to all those political headlines in 2025,” Maxey said.
To be sure, investors have spent much of this past year worrying whether Trump’s sweeping, ever-shifting tariff policies would trigger a global trade war, stoke a rapid increase in inflation, or tip the world’s largest economy into recession. Those fears have yet materialize.
Aside from a brief bout of volatility in April after “liberation day,” the stock market has shrugged off most of these concerns and trended higher ever since — although investors are still awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling on whether most of the tariffs will ultimately stand.
While waiting on more tariff clarity, the S&P 500 has recorded 42 all-time closing highs since Jan. 20, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA has registered 23 such peaks and the Nasdaq Composite COMP has finished at record levels 36 times, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Beyond market swings, the broader U.S. economy has been expanding faster than expected. Gross domestic product, the official scorecard of the economy, fell in the first quarter of 2025 for the first time in three years. GDP then rebounded with big gains in the second and third quarters. For all of 2025, GDP is expected to show growth of 2.5% or more.
The labor market has cooled but remains relatively stable, with the unemployment rate at 4.4% in December — the lowest level in about two years, even as slower job growth raises the risk of downward pressure on wages and consumer confidence.
Inflation, despite still being well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, has cooled down from a 41-year high a few years ago. The annual rate of inflation stood at 2.7% in December, according to the latest consumer-price index (CPI) report.
That economic backdrop could now collide with fiscal policy, including Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and his latest affordability initiatives. These include a proposed one-year 10% cap on credit-card interest, which could be “overall supportive to the economy, and eventually flow through to corporate America and to consumer spending,” Maxey said.
Midterm elections loom
Investors are also turning their attention to the 2026 midterm elections, an occasion that isn’t known to be smooth sailing in markets.
Historically, stock-market performance in midterm election years, or the second year of a presidential term, tends to be the weakest in a four-year presidential term cycle. Since 1948, the S&P 500 has delivered an average gain of just 4.6% in midterm election years, posting positive returns only 58% of the time. By contrast, pre-election years, or the third year of a president’s term, historically have been the strongest of these four-year cycles, with average gains of roughly 17.2%, according to data compiled by Ned Davis Research.
U.S. stocks finished lower on Friday. For the week, the Dow dropped 0.3%, while the S&P 500 fell 0.4% and the Nasdaq posted a 0.7% loss, according to FactSet data.
Tuesday marks the first anniversary of President Trump’s return to the White House. All U.S. stock exchanges will be closed for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, and will resume trading on Tuesday morning at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time. Bond markets will also be closed on Monday.
If you're looking for artificial intelligence (AI) stocks that have 10x growth potential within the next 10 years (meaning that they could turn $100,000 into $1 million), you're going to have to find some growth stocks with big potential market opportunities that are largely untapped. Finding stocks that are attractively valued is a bonus.
Let's look at two high-risk, high-reward AI stocks that could rise 10x in the next decade if things fall right.
Image source: Getty Images.
UiPath
Trading at a forward price-to-sales (P/S) multiple of just 5 times 2026 analyst estimates, UiPath(NYSE: PATH) has a ton of upside over the next decade if it can successfully transition into an AI agent operating system and accelerate growth. The company's background in robotic process automation (RPA) -- which uses software bots to complete simple, rules-based tasks -- gives it a strong foundation to become a leader in AI agent orchestration. This is set to become a huge market in the coming years as agentic AI becomes the next big AI advancement, and organizations will need a centralized platform to coordinate specialized AI agents from different vendors.
UiPath, meanwhile, offers some distinct advantages. The first is that its platform already has the governing tools needed to securely manage and audit AI agents from different vendors. As a recent Wall Street Journal experiment with an AI vending machine showed, while large language models (LLMs) can be great at thinking, they can be pretty poor in action. AI agents need hard guardrails to be audited, and humans still need to be kept in the loop. Without these in place, you'd have an AI vending machine that ordered a PlayStation 5 and live fish for inventory, and that was bullied into giving away all its snacks for free. UiPath's Maestro platform, with human-defined rules and the ability to cross-check information, could have prevented this.
Another powerful part of the platform is that Maestro can manage both software bots and AI agents, assigning them to the task for which they are best suited. Given that the cost of deploying AI agents is higher, this is a great cost-saving selling point. In addition, the company also has pre-built connections into legacy systems that AI agents may struggle to reach.
If UiPath can become the leading AI orchestration tool, given the size of the market and its valuation, the stock has tenfold potential.
SentinelOne
SentinelOne(NYSE: S) is another cheap stock trading at a forward P/S multiple of 4 times that has the ability to rise tenfold in the next 10 years. The company has a few opportunities that could lead to this.
The first way would be to take share in the cybersecurity market against larger rival CrowdStrike(NASDAQ: CRWD). While smaller, its technology actually does have some advantages. CrowdStrike is cloud native, while SentinelOne's AI models reside directly in its agents, which helps it block threats even if a machine is offline. It also offers remediation technology by which it can rewind a system to pre-attack levels with the click of a button. This is a big difference compared to CrowdStrike, whose customers ran into huge issues getting their systems back and running after its infamous IT outage.
Meanwhile, with its recent acquisition of Prompt Security, the company is positioning itself to provide real-time AI visibility and to protect organizations from data leakage. This positions the company to offer both inside-out and outside-in protection, helping SentinelOne differentiate itself in the cybersecurity industry.
The company also has an opportunity with its Singularity Data Lake product to take away market share from Splunk, which is now owned by Cisco Systems. With its Purple AI, customers can quickly make secure data queries just using natural language to quickly get data-driven insights, while Splunk has slower manual responses and is more costly.
If it can take share in these markets, the stock has a lot of upside from here.
Should you buy stock in UiPath right now?
Before you buy stock in UiPath, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and UiPath wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $509,470!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,167,988!*
Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 991% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 196% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors.
Geoffrey Seiler has positions in SentinelOne and UiPath. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Cisco Systems, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and UiPath. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) is one of the stocks Jim Cramer talked about. Answering a caller’s query about the stock during the lightning round, Cramer said:
“I think that Nikesh Arora does a great job. I slighted him too much. I said so many good things about CrowdStrike earlier. Palo Alto’s a terrific company is well off its high. I think it is a buy.”
A stock market graph. Photo by Alesia Kozik on Pexels
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) provides cybersecurity platforms that include network protection, cloud security, AI-driven security operations, attack surface management, and subscription-based threat prevention. When a caller showed interest in buying the stock during the episode aired on November 6, 2025, Cramer replied:
“Look, I think it’s good. I’m certainly not going to fight that. The stock is not that down from its high versus a lot of others. But I think that the, let’s say, the secular bull case for cybersecurity has never been better. And I love Nikesh’s acquisition of CyberArk. That is just sensational.”
While we acknowledge the potential of PANW as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.
Emerging markets have concluded 2025 with a significant surge, outperforming major Wall Street averages. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index, which encompasses large- and mid-cap stocks from developing nations, has seen an approximate 30% increase since the start of the year.
The emerging markets’ stock indexes have hit record highs at the end of 2025. Certain countries within this group, including Greece, Chile, and the Czech Republic, have demonstrated particularly strong performances.
The Athens Composite, Greece’s primary index, has seen a nearly 44% increase over the year and is anticipated to be promoted to developed market status in September 2026.
During a roundtable event in London in November, fund managers at Ninety One, an asset management firm overseeing assets worth over $203 billion, expressed optimism about the potential for further growth in various emerging markets in 2026, reports CNBC.
Portfolio manager Varun Laijawalla referred to 2025 as a “year of change” across numerous sectors.
Speaking with the outlet, Laijawalla also highlighted that the U.S. dollar had weakened over the year following “15 years of a one-way trade.”
This has positively affected emerging economies that depend on foreign capital, as it lowers the local currency cost of dollar-denominated debt and can boost investment inflows from overseas.
Mislav Matejka, the Head of Global and European Equity Strategy at JP Morgan, speaking at the bank’s London headquarters, predicted that emerging markets are set for a second year of outperformance in 2026.
Factors contributing to this outlook include appealing valuations, currency movements, and economic growth patterns.
The impressive performance of emerging markets in 2025 is not just a one-off event. The weakening of the U.S. dollar, which reduces the cost of dollar-denominated debt, coupled with the attractive valuations and economic growth trajectories, are all factors that are setting the stage for these markets to continue their upward trend in 2026.
The anticipated upgrade of Greece to developed market status further underscores the potential for growth in these markets.
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ADTRAN sees strong momentum into 2026 driven by broad-based optical demand, seasonal access strength in H1 and new wins that began converting in late 2025.
The company expects a continuing Huawei replacement opportunity of about $800 million annually in Europe, roughly split between access and optical, with replacement work and funding discussions (including EU support) unfolding in phases.
Profitability and balance-sheet progress includes gross margins trending toward a 42–43% range, a goal of double-digit operating margins, and a ~$200 million convertible financing used to pay down higher-cost debt and reopen the credit facility.
ADTRAN Stock is a Compelling Broadband Infrastructure Play
ADTRAN (NASDAQ:ADTN) executives highlighted improving demand trends, expanding optical momentum, and a growing set of European opportunities during a discussion at Needham’s 20th Annual Growth Conference. Chairperson and CEO Tom Stanton and CFO Tim Santo also addressed profitability progress, balance sheet actions, and how customers are planning networks amid AI-driven traffic growth.
Optical strength and improving demand backdrop
Stanton said the company feels “much better” entering 2026 compared with the period when ADTRAN was working through supply chain readjustments. He attributed some of 2025’s optical performance to a return toward more normal spending as customers worked through inventory that had “hung over for a couple of years,” and to increasing activity that ADTRAN first noticed in the prior year through requests for proposals and planning. Those plans, he said, began translating into results in the third quarter, leaving the company feeling it had “really good momentum” for the rest of the year and beyond.
Looking to 2026, Stanton described the opportunity set as broad-based, citing continued optical momentum and typical seasonal strength in the access business during the first half of the year as European carriers “start coming online.” He added that ADTRAN has new wins expected to contribute in that period.
Europe and Huawei replacement opportunity
A major focus of the discussion was the ongoing replacement of Huawei equipment in Europe. Stanton characterized the overall opportunity as “somewhere around $800 million annually” that over time shifts away from Huawei to other vendors, calling it a continuing bright spot. He noted activity remains strong, with increased strategy discussions around what to do about the installed base.
Stanton described the replacement process in phases, emphasizing the near-term importance of “quit deploying” new Huawei gear—both new chassis and, more challengingly, line cards—until competitive processes are complete and awards are made. A later phase involves how to fund removal and replacement of what he described as a “$10 billion-plus worth of installed base,” referencing policy discussions in the EU and Germany about payment mechanisms, including the potential for EU-level support.
Italy was cited as a notable example. Stanton said Italy is “not typically a first mover,” but ADTRAN won an optical piece around the middle of the prior year and is also now under contract on the access portion, which requires the company to begin shipping.
When asked whether the Huawei displacement opportunity is roughly balanced between access and optical, Stanton said that at a high level they are “roughly equal in magnitude,” though they will materialize in different ways.
BEAD timing expectations and customer inventory
On the U.S. broadband buildout supported by BEAD, Stanton said added certainty around awards and the program has already helped because customers have started “unlocking” plans that were pent up for roughly a year and a half. However, he expects any revenue contribution to ramp gradually.
Stanton said he does not expect a “big uptick” in the first half of the year, with activity coming on more in the second half as money starts to flow and programs are initiated.
He said early revenue could appear in the first half but would be “immaterial,” with deployment building over the next two to three years.
He noted it can be difficult to separate BEAD dollars from non-BEAD because equipment does not necessarily appear distinct, but ADTRAN can see that award-winning customers are ordering equipment.
On customer inventory conditions more broadly, Stanton said he is not aware of any current inventory overhang, stating that customers are “buying what they need right now.” He acknowledged some European customers purchase upfront as part of their operating plans and that order timing can be lumpy, but he did not characterize that as an inventory problem.
Profitability progress, margins, and balance sheet actions
Santo said improvements in profitability metrics have been driven by cost discipline, leveraging scale, and ongoing work to manage purchasing volume and supply chain costs. On gross margin, he reiterated the company’s previously discussed range, saying the 42% to 43% level is “beyond achievable,” and that ADTRAN is already trending within that range and expects to “continue to notch higher.” He added that while there will be tailwinds and headwinds over the next couple of years, ADTRAN expects the overall trend across its product base to be positive.
Addressing supply chain cost concerns such as memory and optical components, Santo said the issue is “not material” for ADTRAN and that the company has largely navigated the environment, offsetting impacts while remaining confident in the guidance it has published.
Both executives reiterated that the company’s goal remains to reach double-digit operating margins.
On balance sheet moves, Santo discussed a convertible financing, describing it as about a $200 million capital raise. He said proceeds were used to pay down approximately 9% debt with a 3.5% (or 375) coupon instrument, calling it a significant reduction in the cost of funds. He added that the transaction also “reopen[ed]” the company’s credit facility, providing flexibility over time to reduce the minority interest share of its German business.
Regarding asset dispositions and real estate, Santo said ADTRAN is separately pursuing the sale of its North South Tower property and is working on multiple potential transactions. He cited increased local activity in Huntsville, Alabama—including U.S. Space Command moving there and Eli Lilly announcing a $6 billion investment—as contributing to interest, while noting that selling a large Class A office asset can take time because it requires the right buyer. He said a sale-leaseback of the current corporate headquarters is still being evaluated, but following the convertible transaction there is “not a solid need for the cash,” and such a move would increase operating expense pressure.
AI, product positioning, and competitive dynamics
Stanton outlined several ways AI intersects with ADTRAN’s business. He said the company has launched “Clarity,” an agentic AI tool now in beta testing, describing early results as “very, very good.” He said the tool is designed to improve maintenance, troubleshooting, and identifying latent network issues by analyzing trouble logs and leveraging a database across multiple customers to steer carriers toward solutions, potentially before they are aware of a problem.
Stanton also linked AI-driven demand to optical upgrades, stating that ADTRAN has an installed base of optical gear that will need upgrades as hyperscalers upgrade their networks, including hyperscalers currently using ADTRAN equipment. He added that carriers are developing plans to connect into hyperscaler networks and that access networks—what carriers “own”—will be upgraded with an eye toward feeding higher-bandwidth IP-based networks.
In competitive terms, Stanton said he feels good about the current landscape, noting fewer competitors in access and arguing ADTRAN has a next-generation product versus competitors that are “still selling chassis-based products.” In optical, he said ADTRAN benefits from strong name recognition in Europe and suggested competitors’ focus on hyperscalers can create openings when they are less responsive on RFPs, inventory, or shipments. He said ADTRAN previously saw some tailwind from customer disruption tied to the Nokia/Infinera combination, but described that impact as largely having played out.
In closing remarks, Stanton said the company has been doing “what we said we were going to do two years ago,” adding that ADTRAN has been consistent in “hitting or beating” its numbers and that continued execution is the key factor going forward.
About ADTRAN (NASDAQ:ADTN)
ADTRAN, Inc is a global provider of networking and communications equipment, specializing in broadband access solutions for service providers, enterprises and government organizations. Founded in 1985 and headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, the company develops and delivers hardware and software platforms that enable high-speed Internet access over fiber, copper and wireless networks. Its core offerings include fiber access and aggregation equipment, Ethernet switches, customer premises equipment (CPE) and network management systems designed to support both legacy and next-generation broadband deployments.
The company's product portfolio encompasses a broad range of optical line terminals (OLTs), optical network terminals (ONTs), multiservice access gateways and virtualized access solutions.
Most economists don't expect the U.S. economy will enter a recession in 2026. J.P. Morgan(NYSE: JPM) Global Research projects the likelihood of a recession this year at only 35%. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's probability of a recession by November 2026 based on Treasury spreads is even lower.
They could be wrong, though. Should you buy stocks if a recession is indeed coming this year? Here's what history shows.
Image source: Getty Images.
A clear pattern
The S&P 500(SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) was established in its current form with 500 companies in March 1957. Since then, the U.S. has experienced 10 recessions. How did the index perform during the years a recession began?
It took only five months for the first recession to occur following the creation of the S&P 500. The Federal Reserve had increased interest rates to combat rising inflation. A recession began in August 1957 that lasted for eight months. The S&P 500 ended down 11% in its inaugural year.
Two mild recessions came over the next 12 years, one beginning in 1960 and another in 1969. The S&P 500 fell by 2% in 1960 and by nearly 11% in 1969.
The Arab oil embargo that began in 1973 led to a more severe U.S. recession. Unsurprisingly, the impact on the stock market was significant, with the S&P 500 plunging 19%.
A "double-dip" recession hit the U.S. economy beginning in 1980. While the first part of this recession lasted only six months, the economy went into recession again in July 1981. The S&P 500 declined during the recessionary period in 1980, but rebounded to end the year up by almost 24%. However, the index fell nearly 8% the following year with the second part of the double-dip recession.
Other U.S. recessions began in 1990 and 2001, with the S&P 500 declining both years. The most recent two recessions were anomalies, though. The Great Recession began in December 2007. Although the S&P 500 gained over 4% that year, it began to tumble in the final few months and plunged nearly 41% in 2008. The S&P 500 also sold off sharply during the COVID-19 recession of 2020. However, the recession and the downturn were short-lived. The S&P ended 2020 up by roughly 16%.
The clear pattern from these 10 recessions is that the S&P 500 almost always performs dismally during an economic downturn. The only cases where the index delivered positive gains during a year a recession began were when the recession either lasted for only a few months at the beginning of a year or began at the end of a year.
An even clearer pattern
There is a clear pattern for the S&P 500's performance during years that recessions started. However, I think an even clearer pattern emerges when we expand our time horizon. Check out the table below:
U.S. Recession Start
S&P Gain/Loss
5 Years Later
S&P 500 Gain/Loss
10 Years Later
August 1957
+24%
+103%
April 1960
+56%
+59%
December 1969
-21%
+14%
November 1973
-1%
+64%
January 1980
+53%
+223%
July 1981
+90%
+193%
July 1990
+50%
+306%
March 2001
-17%
-25%
December 2007
-5%
+77%
February 2020
+309%
To be determined
Data source: YCharts. Table created by author.
In most cases, the S&P 500 was up by a solid percentage within 5 years following the start of a recession. The index also delivered strong returns over the next 10 years in each case except the recession in 2001 that occurred after the dot-com bubble burst. This period included the financial crisis of 2007 through 2009, which was one of the worst economic challenges in U.S. history.
Overall, the average gain for the S&P 500 five years after the beginning of a recession has been almost 54%. The average gain 10 years later of almost 113% is even more impressive.
An easy answer
Let's return to our initial question: Should you buy stocks if a recession is coming in 2026? If history is an guide, the answer is easy – at least if you're a long-term investor. Buying stocks typically pays off over the next five-to-10 years and often does so handsomely.
Maybe the U.S. economy will enter a recession in 2026; maybe it won't. However, whether you invest in an index fund that tracks the S&P 500 or build your own diversified portfolio of stocks, you'll probably be in good shape over the long run regardless of what happens with the economy this year.
Should you buy stock in S&P 500 Index right now?
Before you buy stock in S&P 500 Index, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and S&P 500 Index wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $493,290!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,153,214!*
Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 973% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 195% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors.
JPMorgan Chase is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Keith Speights has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends JPMorgan Chase. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
I hope you enjoyed the holiday! I was happy to take a break from the market gyrations and spend time with family and friends.
It is strange to say that we are now at the end of 2025. And anytime we reach the end of the year, it’s always a good idea to do a little portfolio housekeeping.
The reality is the market should do well in the New Year, aided by the “January Effect.”
The January effect happens when folks pour new funds into the market. Whether it’s a bonus from work or a New Year’s resolution, it’s a phenomenon that happens year after year.
But perhaps the biggest contributor is simply the fact that large fund managers tend to rebalance their portfolios at the beginning of the year. They all have performance benchmarks they want to meet in the New Year, so they tend to load up on top performers when they rebalance.
What’s interesting about the January effect is that it’s more noticeable with small-cap stocks. What’s more, not every January effect is the same.
Still, while not every year is the same, stock prices do tend to rise in the first month of the new year.
This means it’s even more important now that your portfolio is positioned to benefit from the potential future strength. And that’s where my Stock Grader (subscription required) can help. Each week, my system interprets reams of financial data and outputs those results in easy-to-interpret letter grades.
And in today’s Market 360, I want to share 10 stocks you should consider selling before we open the books on 2026. Stock Grader recently flagged all these stocks as very weak. Take a look below; some of these names might surprise you…
Each company on this list received a “D” or an “F” rating in my Stock Grader. So, as we come up on the New Year, it is critical to dump stocks like this from your portfolio. If you want to make real money in the markets, you likely won’t do so with any of the stocks I listed above.
The truth is that next year it will be every stock for itself, which means that companies with strong fundamentals and earnings growth should emerge as the market winners…
So, I encourage you to use the final trading days of 2025 to ensure that your personal portfolios are fully invested in fundamentally superior stocks.
Now, if you’re not sure where to find fundamentally superior stocks, then look no further than my Growth Investor service. In this particular service, I have two Buy Lists: High-Growth Investments and Elite Dividend Payers. And both of these Growth Investor Buy Lists are chock-full of fundamentally superior stocks.
So, if you want to make sure your portfolio is filled with the crème de la crème, fundamentally superior stocks, then join me at Growth Investor today. You’ll receive instant access to all my Buy List stocks, as well as all my Growth Investor Monthly Issues, Weekly Updates, Special Market Podcasts – and much more.
The Editor hereby discloses that as of the date of this email, the Editor, directly or indirectly, owns the following securities that are the subject of the commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, or recommendations in, or which are otherwise mentioned in, the essay set forth below:
