Buy Hold Sell: Ride or rotate? The themes shaping portfolios in 2026

Buy Hold Sell, by Livewire Markets · Dec 22, 2025 · 13m

If 2025 showed investors anything, it’s that the best money wasn’t made by sitting still; it was made by catching the right waves.

While broader markets delivered solid returns, the lion's share of profits went to investors willing to back the big themes: uranium, defence stocks, gold miners, Bitcoin, the Nasdaq, and Australian small caps. Get the wave right, and returns arrive fast.

But as any surfer knows, timing matters. Not every wave kept rolling, and some themes lost momentum just as quickly as they emerged.

So as we head into the New Year, the key question is which of these themes…