2025 was a profitable year … if you stayed invested.
For the second year in a row, every major asset class—stocks, bonds, cash, real estate and commodities—delivered positive returns last year. In fact, every single Vanguard fund finished the year in the black.
That doesn’t mean 2025 was an easy year to live through as an investor.
The noise out of Washington was particularly loud. Stocks flirted with bear market territory in April, falling nearly 20% from their prior highs. Later in the year, fresh worries about AI-related excesses bubbled up, rattling markets once again.
Still, patience paid off. The average Vanguard investor earned a 15.5% return last year—the seventh year of double-digit gains since 2017.
There was plenty of noise out of Vanguard’s Malvern, PA, headquarters, too.
In a surprise move, Vanguard announced it was splitting its investment team into two wholly owned units: Vanguard Capital Management (VCM) and Vanguard Portfolio Management (VPM).
The fund giant also went on a product-launching spree. Vanguard rolled out 15 ETFs in 2025—including its first actively managed ETFs with human stock pickers calling the shots. That’s more launches in a single year than we’ve seen since 2010… and the firm looks poised to exceed that pace in 2026.
Coming soon: a series of Target Maturity Corporate Bond ETFs slated for February, and a new lineup of Target Retirement funds, the Target Retirement Lifetime Income Trusts, which would allow investors to purchase a built-in annuity inside the fund.
In short, Salim Ramji has Vanguard’s product development team working overtime.
Vanguard’s legal team has been busy as well. The firm reached a settlement with target-date fund shareholders and faced lawsuits tied to $100 account-closing fees, data-sharing practices and its acquisition of Just Invest.
Let’s hope Vanguard’s tech team is working just as hard. The firm is reportedly spending $3 billion a year upgrading its systems, yet service hiccups and tech missteps continue to plague the fund giant.
You can find my 2025 Outlook, “Investing Beyond the AI Hype,” here. I’ll follow up with a deeper look at how the markets fared in 2025. But first, here are the events and moments that caught my attention throughout the year: