Top 10 Blogs of 2025: Insights on Market Cycles and Financial History

The blogs that resonated most with readers in 2025 were those that used historical evidence to illuminate present-day dynamics. Across topics — market concentration, small-cap cycles, private-equity stress, geopolitical shifts, AI, and even foundational valuation tools like discounted cash flow — practitioners consistently sought analysis that connected current signals to the longer arcs that shape them. And the Most Read blog published in 2025, built entirely around historical quotes, shows how powerful distilled insight can be.

Mark J. Higgins, CFA, CFP, and Rachel Kloepfer take us on a compact tour through centuries of market wisdom, highlighting behavioral tendencies that repeat across cycles and helping investors recognize them in current conditions.

Daniel Fang, CFA, CAIA, reviews the structural and cyclical forces that shape relative performance between small and large caps. He outlines the conditions that have marked turning points in past cycles.

Bill Pauley, CFA, Kevin Bales, CFA, and Adam Schreiber, CFA, CAIA, examine historical concentration regimes that resulted in “lost decades,” highlighting how elevated dependence on a small group of stocks can reshape risk, diversification, and forward return expectations.

Mark J. Higgins, CFA, CFP, breaks down seven indicators that private-market risks may be rising, providing investors with a practical lens for evaluating structural and late-cycle vulnerabilities.

Michael Schopf, CFA, presents a head-to-head comparison of AI models and human analysts. The results show where machines now outperform, where analysts retain an edge, and how this evolving division of strengths is reshaping research teams.

In this review of prior Fed cutting cycles, Bill Pauley, CFA, Kevin Bales, CFA, Adam Schreiber, CFA, CAIA, and Ty Painter highlight the market patterns, sector rotations, and risk dynamics that tend to follow policy pivots, giving investors a clear framework for interpreting today’s rate environment.

Written in April, this piece offered a forward-looking analysis of how tariff shifts and geopolitical tensions were expected to influence the global economy through 2025. Kanan Mammadov framed his outlook with macro context around growth, inflation, and evolving regional market conditions.

Markus Schuller, Michelle Sisto, PhD, Wojtek Wojaczek, PhD, Franz Mohr, Patrick J. Wierckx, CFA, and Jurgen Janssens offer a practical look at how investment teams are adopting AI across research, portfolio construction, and workflow design. They distill five lessons from early front-line deployment and the operational changes the technology is driving.

Sandeep Srinivas, CFA, reviews the challenges of applying discounted cash flow models, underscoring their sensitivity to assumptions and the practical complexities that arise in real-world analysis.

Paul Lavery, PhD, explains why private-equity buyouts rely on multi-entity structures, showing how acquisition vehicles and layered financing shape deal mechanics and affect risk and portfolio company outcomes. Understanding this architecture is essential for evaluating modern PE transactions.