Rathbones' Co-Chief Investment Officer Ed Smith considers what lessons investors have learnt in 2025, noting the ability of financial markets to deliver strong market returns amid all the political turmoil.

Key topics covered:

• Corporate resilience: global companies have weathered daunting uncertainty, with profits and share prices up
• Government bonds: longer-dated yields are likely to stay high
• Correlations: investors can’t rely anymore on longer-dated government bonds to move in the other direction to stocks
• Politics: investors tend to be pretty bad at forecasting political outcomes, so don’t make investments based on binary predictions