{"id":482789,"date":"2025-12-31T16:51:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T16:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/482789\/"},"modified":"2025-12-31T16:51:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T16:51:13","slug":"the-five-biggest-stock-winners-of-the-year-and-what-drove-their-big-gains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/482789\/","title":{"rendered":"The five biggest stock winners of the year and what drove their big gains"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What a year it has been, especially for the five best-performing S &amp; P 500 stocks. While Nvidia , Alphabet and the rest of the &#8220;Magnificent Seven&#8221; garnered many of the headlines in 2025, the benchmark index was led by the following five stocks: Western Digital , Micron Technology , Seagate Technology , Robinhood and Warner Bros Discovery . The first four names on the list more than tripled this year, while Warner surged more than 170% \u2014 far outpacing the S &amp; P 500&#8217;s 17.3% gain. Western Digital, Micron and Seagate had a common driver: big demand for memory. The AI boom this year led to major shortages of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chips in 2025, sending prices skyrocketing. Demand doesn&#8217;t appear to be letting up, either. Counterpoint Research said earlier this month that memory prices will &#8220;rise another 40% through Q2 2026, resulting in BoM costs increasing anywhere between 8% and over 15% above current elevated levels.&#8221; Robinhood, meanwhile, got a big boost from mom-and-pop traders, who had a major year. Retail traders, as Alex Harring&#8217;s story points out , knew when to buy into pullbacks \u2014 fueling the broader market&#8217;s rally to record levels. Many of these traders did so through their Robinhood accounts. The company also expanded its product offerings to include prediction markets betting . HOOD YTD mountain Robinhood, YTD Truist earlier in December initiated the online brokerage with a buy rating, noting: &#8220;HOOD&#8217;s leading product velocity has driven sizable growth in key metrics &amp; share gains as the company expands its addressable customer universe, allowing it to keep moving upmarket towards larger wallets.&#8221; As for Warner, it&#8217;s been all about M &amp; A. The company this year has entertained acquisition offers, sending shares soaring. Warner said Dec. 5 it would sell its film and streaming assets to Netflix for $72 billion. Paramount made rival offers, but Warner is expected to formally reject the CBS parent&#8217;s latest proposal, per reporting from CNBC&#8217;s David Faber.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What a year it has been, especially for the five best-performing S &amp; P 500 stocks. While Nvidia&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":482790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[68226,81,171,3346,7070,147,25799,95110,134,67,132,68,16276,115827],"class_list":{"0":"post-482789","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-alphabet-class-a","9":"tag-business-news","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-investment-strategy","12":"tag-micron-technology-inc","13":"tag-nvidia-corp","14":"tag-robinhood-markets-inc","15":"tag-seagate-technology-holdings-plc","16":"tag-stock-markets","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-warner-bros-discovery-inc","21":"tag-western-digital-corp"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115815218469639002","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}