A Year in Numbers: 2025 Portfolio Review
Written by Camille
2025 is wrapping up, which means it’s time to look back at the first full year of our public portfolio and actually check whether our investment strategy did what it was supposed to do.
As of December 29, the portfolio is up 37% for the year. For comparison, the S&P 500 (the 500 biggest U.S. companies) is up 19%, and the MSCI World (over 1,000 of the largest companies around the globe) is up 23%.
That’s some significant outperformance, considering that investing is a game of small edges; even 1–2 percentage points of extra return, repeated over decades, compounds into something surprisingly large.
Why do we keep comparing our results to big indexes like the S&P 500 and MSCI World?
Because that’s the default option. If you don’t want to spend your evenings reading annual reports or thinking about business strategy, you can buy a low-cost index fund, get instant diversification, and move on with your life. That’s what most sensible people do, and honestly, it’s a great baseline.
So the indexes represent the return you could have gotten by simply owning the market and calling it a day. If we’re going to be buying individual companies, we should be trying to earn something for that effort.
Looking back on 2025
Our biggest wins:
British American Tobacco: +51% in 2025 (dividends included)
For a while, BAT was priced like cigarettes were about to vanish any minute now. Then reality kicked in: cigarettes are declining, yes, but not disappearing overnight. And nicotine alternatives (especially oral pouches) are growing fast.Lam Research: +74% since we bought in early September
When chipmakers spend more on building and upgrading fabs (especially for AI-related chips), Lam tends to benefit. Add record revenue/profitability, and investors have been bidding the stock up accordingly.Alphabet (Google): +91% since we bought in June
For a brief moment, the story was: “AI is going to eat search, Google is cooked.” Then Alphabet put up a few quarters of “actually, we’re still printing money” results. Investors basically went from “uh oh” to “never mind,” and the stock followed.
Our biggest losses:
Evolution AB: -29% since we bought in late January
Evolution is still a very profitable business, but in 2025 it dealt with real setbacks, including cyber issues in parts of Asia and regulatory scrutiny in Europe. At the same time, growth slowed (and in some areas even went backwards). When a company is priced for smooth growth and then delivers turbulence, investors usually sell first and ask questions later.MSCI: 0% in 2025
MSCI is the definition of a high-quality business. Coming into 2025, expectations were high and the valuation reflected that. For the next 12 months the stock basically did the boring, healthy thing: it let the fundamentals catch up while the valuation cooled off.
Stock prices don’t climb in a neat, straight line. Pull up a chart of almost any legendary compounder, the kind of company that ends up delivering “how is this even possible” returns over decades, and you’ll still see plenty of ugly stretches: drawdowns, flat years, long periods where the stock does nothing, and moments when everyone decides it’s suddenly “over.”
Volatility isn’t a bug in investing, it’s the admission price. You don’t get access to the best businesses in the world at attractive long-term returns without occasionally living through weeks (or months) where the market disagrees with you loudly.
Change is coming
With 2026 comes a bit of a refresh: we’re making some positive changes to RatedA to make the member experience clearer, tighter, and more useful.
Going forward, this newsletter will go out to members every Monday. It’ll include:
Every portfolio move from the week (buys, sells, adds, trims), if there are any, plus the why behind each decision, in plain English.
Once a month, we’ll publish our Top 3 Buy Ideas, so you can see what we’d prioritise right now if you’re putting new money to work.
A quick “what changed in our database” roundup: rating updates, outlook changes, dividend raises (and cuts), and anything else that matters.
The goal is simple: you should never have to guess what we’re doing, what changed, or what we currently like best. You’ll get the full paper trail, and a short list of the most actionable ideas, without needing to spend your weekend digging through 12 different tabs.
The free version of the newsletter will stay mostly the same as it is today: interesting stories, useful investing lessons, and the occasional big-picture market note (usually once or twice a month).
So here’s to a new year of steady, consistent investing: more signal, fewer guesses, more good decisions.
