The Oscars for markets: 5 awards that highlight the biggest stories of the year

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If you're like me, you'll tune into the Oscars this Sunday to see the A-list likes of Timothée Chalamet, Michael B. Jordan, Emma Stone, and Leonardo DiCaprio duke it out for golden statues. If Will Smith is going to slap someone else, we want to see it live.

But the performers will be exhausted. For them, the Oscars is the final boss of a multi-month awards-show gauntlet. It begs the question: does Hollywood really need so many awards ceremonies?

What the world — particularly the audience of First Trade — really needs is a good set of awards for markets. We're here to anoint the best performers, hottest newcomers, and most riveting stories across asset classes.

Without further ado, the first annual First Trade Awards:

Best New Speculative Asset

2025 was the year when gold went full mask-off as a risk asset. Traditionally viewed as a safe haven, the precious metal got swept up in the frenzied AI-data-center buildout and also caught the eye of retail investors looking to ride the wave.

It ended up rallying alongside stocks to a series of record highs. Take a bow, gold, you're up more than 90% since the start of 2025.

Best Supporting AI Stock

When it comes to making chips for the AI revolution, Nvidia has the starring role. It is, after all, the most valuable company on earth. But over the past year or so, returns for the king chipmaker have been eclipsed by the No. 2 holder of market share: AMD.

Shares were lifted into a new stratosphere in early October, when the company inked a huge deal with OpenAI. It may not be as big as Nvidia, but it's making headway.

Best Market Villain

If there was one Big Bad throughout the recent software sell-off, it was definitely Anthropic. Over the course of a month, the company quietly published multiple blog posts outlining new AI-driven capabilities it had unlocked. Each one resulted in a swift erasure of value in a specific sector.

Combine that with Anthropic's Super Bowl commercial that went after OpenAI, and you have a company that isn't afraid to boldly make waves … and enemies.

Best Sequel

Meta's big bet on the metaverse has aged like spoiled milk. But rather than accept defeat, the company pivoted to AI, where it's emerged as a power player.

Meta's stock may be well off its highs amid mounting AI skepticism, but it's still more than doubled since first announcing its pivot to the metaverse in 2021. If the company's metaverse push was the ambitious world-building epic, AI is the tighter, smarter sequel.

Best New Risk

As investors have contended with Trump 2.0, AI mania, and most recently, the Iran war, a new challenger has entered the arena of market tail risks: private credit. With more than $2 trillion in assets under management, it's growing in popularity with retail investors.

But that retail exposure is part of the problem. Market pros are increasingly wondering if it's the next source of systemic financial risk. It's been called a possible "canary in the coal mine" by former Pimco CEO Mohamed El-Erian, while JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon has warned of credit "cockroaches." And the issues keep compounding.