Volatile year tests Dalal Street mettle; metals dazzle

MUMBAI: In 2025, single-digit gains in the sensex and Nifty hid Dalal Street’s efforts to balance local and global factors which left investors jittery at regular intervals. Behind the headline numbers, however, new market darlings emerged, some older ones lost favour with investors, a number of well-known companies went public, IPOs garnered record amounts from investors and the mutual fund industry inched closer to reaching its first trillion-dollar assets mark. On Wednesday, Nifty closed the year up 10.5% while the sensex was up 9.1%. Among the leading indices from major global markets, the sensex and Nifty were the major underperformers. Among the sensex stocks, Maruti, Bajaj Finance and Bharat Electronics, a PSU from the defence sector, were the top gainers of 2025. In contrast, Trent, a Tata Group company that runs the popular Zudio retail stores across the country, was the top laggard. TCS, another Tata Group company, and HCL Tech, were also among the top laggards. The year will also be marked as the one when IPOs by startups became commonplace, offers of Rs 5,000-crore became a benchmark to call an offer ‘a large one’ and investors on the street didn’t raise eyebrows if a company said it was planning to raise Rs 10,000 crore through the IPO route. In the SME space, over 250 companies went public through IPOs, a record number since these companies were allowed to list on either of the two specialised platforms, run by BSE and NSE. Overall, about 365 IPOs together mobilised nearly Rs 2 lakh crore with 94% of this coming from the large ones, a report by Motilal Oswal Financial Services noted. In the mutual fund space, by end-Nov, total assets managed by the industry had jumped 21% to Rs 80.8 lakh crore (around $900 billion). As investors continued to mature and poured money through the SIP route, gross monthly inflows through this channel jumped from Rs 26,459 crore in Dec 2024 to Rs 29,445 crore by Nov 2025. Data for Dec 2025 is due in early Jan.

The year would also be remembered as the one when precious metals – gold and silver – attracted investor interest at an unprecedented scale. Geopolitical tensions, investment demand from central banks (for the yellow metal) and ETF managers from across the globe and weakness of the dollar against other major currencies lifted returns from these metals to multi-decade highs, pushing prices to all-time peaks, industry analysts said. For silver, the continuing supply-demand mismatch that is expanding at a fast clip, also gave its price an extra boost to move north. With a 174% jump in the domestic market, silver, as one market veteran commented on a social media platform, ‘took the gold’ among investable assets in 2025. With a 78% return gold followed. Bitcoin, which had a stellar run in 2024 with a triple-digit gain, struggled. Despite softer interest rates in the US and a huge support from the President of the world’s largest economy, the crypto leader struggled to hold its ground and closed the year marginally lower.