Anthony Pompliano: 5 Lessons Learned in 2025

Author: Anthony Pompliano, Founder and CEO of Professional Capital Management

As we approach the last two weeks of this year, I would like to share five lessons I have learned this year.

Always question consensus and look for moments to prohibit dissent.

First, always question the mainstream narrative. The tariff panic in the first half of 2025 led many investors to sell off assets, predict a market crash, or face significant setbacks in the financial markets. I was fortunate to gain a better understanding of the situation during the tariffs imposed on various goods in 2018 by personally analyzing original data, thereby avoiding falling into this trap.

In retrospect, the reason I was able to realize the necessity of this analysis was that I detected a worrying pattern. Once dissent is prohibited, mainstream views are almost always wrong. We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic, where people were labeled “Make America Great Again (MAGA) enthusiasts” simply for suggesting that tariffs would not lead to high inflation, empty shelves, or trigger the next Great Depression, which is obvious.

Sometimes it is necessary to filter out noise and study market structure

The second lesson I learned this year is that market structure can overshadow all narratives and sentiments. Bitcoin is a great example. At the beginning of the year, everyone was excited because Trump was determined to become the first Bitcoin president, and ETF funds were flooding in like a tide, with Wall Street also ready to embrace the digital industry.

Despite Bitcoin's strong performance in the first half of the year, it ultimately plummeted nearly 40% from its historic high, disappointing many investors. There are many reasons for this continued lack of upward momentum, including massive options sell-offs, a large-scale liquidation on October 10, and significant profit-taking by early investors.

The atmosphere is good. The narrative is flawless. But in the end, the power of the market structure is just too strong.

Panic marketing is now very popular, but the supply and demand relationship remains unbreakable.

The third lesson I learned this year is: bubbles are very tempting, but still very rare. We have seen this in the public markets related to artificial intelligence. It seems that many people have watched the movie “The Big Short,” and now they all want to predict the next market crash. In the past few years, short selling has become a trend.

However, the stock market does not care about the feelings or opinions of these people. Innovation can create value out of thin air, and artificial intelligence is just like that. Market participants claim they cannot meet demand, yet they worry about bubbles forming and bursting; this idea is truly absurd.

I have never encountered anyone who asserts that artificial intelligence will have no value in the future, but there are indeed many doubts about the financial returns of huge investments. These are all worth discussing. However, predicting the next financial crisis every two months is really meaningless. I often think of Bill Gates' famous saying: “We overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in ten years.”

Americans are addicted to gambling, choose gambling methods wisely.

The fourth lesson I learned this year is that gambling is the most popular activity among Americans. Throughout this year, such examples have emerged one after another. Zero-date options dominate the market. Single stock ETFs with leverage ratios as high as 3 times or even 5 times are emerging one after another. Sports betting is sweeping the nation. Meanwhile, prediction markets have achieved the most successful brand transformation in history, convincing people that they are predicting the future rather than betting on the weather, the color of someone's tie, or whether a shooting suspect can be caught within 48 hours.

I don't claim to be morally superior; I believe that all financial markets are essentially speculative activities, plain and simple, it's gambling. Buying stocks is essentially gambling, buying options is also gambling, and buying cryptocurrencies is still gambling. The only difference is that the success rate of these investment activities is much higher than that of buying lottery tickets, playing blackjack, or betting on NFL Sunday games.

The open market will become popular again

The fifth lesson I learned this year is that in the coming years, the public market will increasingly be favored by the younger generation of entrepreneurs. In the past, maintaining privatization for as long as possible seemed to be a trend. SpaceX is considering going public next year. Medline has just gone public after being established for nearly half a century. OpenAI and several other companies are also paying attention to the public market.

People are gradually realizing that the public market can provide a more convenient financing channel, and the strict regulation of the market will encourage companies to improve operational efficiency. Additionally, due to the influx of large amounts of capital into the private placement market, the average return of venture capital funds has been squeezed, so it is not surprising that founders, executives, and investors would once again begin to utilize the public market for financing.

This will have a profound impact on the companies that choose this path, and it will also affect millions of investors who have been excluded from some of the best investment opportunities due to a lack of access channels or outdated certification regulations.

Here are the top five lessons I am currently most focused on for 2025. I usually summarize in the last two weeks of the year, reflecting on what I've done well, what I've done poorly, and what key lessons I've learned. If I think of any other information that I believe would be valuable to everyone, I will write another article to share more conclusions.