Consult Your Experts After Huge Week in Markets

Here's how to invest as rate cut odds increase.

View or listen in browser January 18, 2025 Consult Your Experts After Huge Week in Markets Dear Subscriber, By Jim Nelson This week was good for most investors.  The S&P 500 jumped back above 6,000 yesterday.  Gold trekked to $2,750 per ounce. Bitcoin rocketed back above $104K.  Even small-cap stocks jumped on the week.  Why the excitement? Investors are once again seeing a path toward more interest rate cuts.  Just a week ago, the market odds of us ending 2025 with rates exactly where we entered this year were 30.5%.  Today, those odds dropped to 16.7%.  Source: The CME FedWatch Tool. Click here to see full-sized image.   Investors see a light at the end of the tunnel. The question we’ve been asking a lot around Weiss Ratings HQ is “Do we?” The answers I’ve been hearing in our regular editorial meetings are mixed. But not one is throwing their hands in the air in either despair or overexuberance.  Each of your experts has new, fresh ideas of how to play everything the market is going to throw our way in 2025 — rate cuts or not. Here’s what they recommend right now … Crypto, Income & Limited Downside Even before Bitcoin rallied, Nilus Mattive — your Safe Money expert — started digging into ways to play the king of crypto in a way to limit your downside risk. A new fund might give you exactly that.  The Answer to a New Tax Question in 2025 With so many first-time crypto investors here in the traditional finance world — since the launch of Bitcoin ETFs last January — we asked Crypto Managing Editor Beth Canova to tell us what to expect this tax season. Load for Bear with Dividend Growers Obviously, it just makes plain sense to prepare for the worst … even if investors are starting to feel like it’s 1999 again. That’s why Sean Brodrick lays out how and why dividend growers deserve a spot in your portfolio.  California Disaster Adds Fuel to the Insurance Firestorm Our Director of Research & Ratings Gavin Magor dug into our deep database of insurance ratings and found an alarming trend. And it could impact your own policy. You’ll want to take advantage of what he found. Invest in Light Speed Data We have a new member of the $1 trillion market cap club. Michael A. Robinson tells you all about it and why its newest product could push that market cap even higher this year.  Have a great weekend! Jim Nelson Managing Editor, Weiss Ratings Daily Follow us:   11780 US Highway 1, Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33408-3080, USA Would you like to edit your e-mail notification preferences or unsubscribe from our mailing list? Copyright © 2025 Weiss Ratings. All rights reserved.