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|  |  | Friday, December 26, 2025 | |  | | Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, Wall Street hands out trophies for 2025, AI investors name their brilliant-but-boring daily drivers, GDP lands out of sync with the mood on the ground, and AI makes a move on the holiday classics. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | The AI boom finds a second home on K
Street. IssueOne puts big players’ lobbying at $50 million through September, a warm-up for 2026 as companies staff up locally to shape whatever rules Congress eventually writes. | The GDP report arrived late — and felt wrong. The delayed release captures an earlier run of strong
spending and export gains, while today’s weaker sentiment, slower hiring, and rising stress show up after the fact. | Welcome to the age of the
100-month car loan. As automakers retreat from sub-$30,000 models and tariffs squeeze pricing, borrowers extend loans toward 100 months for breathing room, leaving delinquencies climbing. | | | SPONSORED |  | Why You Should Cancel Your Car Insurance | Car insurance rates keep rising — but smart drivers aren’t overpaying. Here’s the deal: Smarter Auto’s free comparison tool lets you check coverage in minutes and unlock ongoing access to lower rates. Drivers report saving more than $600/year
after switching. | | |
| | RACKS TO RICHES | U.S. stocks didn’t just have a good 2025. They had the kind of 2025 that turns otherwise normal adults into chart hobbyists and makes “up triple digits” sound like a reasonable thing to say about companies that sell
grown-up, boring stuff. The familiar giants did plenty of winning, sure, but the real tell was where the biggest percentage gains showed up. In prior decades, 100%-plus runs were a small-cap party trick. In the 2020s, that move has migrated up the food chain, and 2025 kept proving that the market’s attention span is long enough to learn a ticker acronym and short enough to immediately turn it into a mania.
Start with AI, where the rally spread outward from the headline names into the
infrastructure. Western Digital rose 275% through late December, Seagate gained 226%, and Micron surged 210% as investors treated data storage and high-bandwidth memory like the new oil drums. Even the pick-and-shovel layer ripped higher, with Lam Research jumping from around $70 at the start of the year to around $170 by the end, good for nearly 150% gains. On the software side, Palantir climbed 157% through late December on growing government and enterprise contracts, while Robinhood rose 209% through late December as retail enthusiasm and
crypto trading translated into revenue momentum.
Then, the market pulled its best stunt of the year and did the “and also” trade at full volume. Gold prices rose 70% year to date through late December, and miners leveraged that move into their own monster runs. Next, toss in some comeback scripts, including Intel up 80% through the end of the year. Even within the Magnificent Seven, which broadly returned around 20% on average in 2025, Alphabet stood out with roughly 60% gains as it
drew attention as a Berkshire Hathaway holding, got fresh buzz for Gemini closing the gap with ChatGPT, and picked up extra intrigue from talk of a potential strategic deal involving Meta. In 2025, the market’s real superpower was appetite — and it got rewarded like discipline. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on why “safe” and “speculative” rallied together this year. | | | RECOMMENDED
READING | The future of tech, decoded.
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| | | MODEL CITIZENS | AI startups have spent the last couple of years pitching a world where software handles the boring parts of work — the inbox triage, the research slog, the follow-up spiral that turns one meeting into six. The investors backing that pitch, though, sound a lot more like cautious power users than wide-eyed believers. When asked what they actually use day to day, they describe a surprisingly small kit of tools that earn their keep through dull competence — especially anything that helps them escape “meeting hell.” They
gravitate toward products that save time, reduce friction, and keep the consequences contained.
Meetings remain the easiest place to earn trust. Transcription and summarization tools were popular before chatbots, and they’re still a mainstay because meetings keep eating up the week. So investors keep praising products that capture decisions and nuance without turning every call into a second job. Granola, founded in 2023, is competing in the same lane as Otter, a roughly decade-old
incumbent that says it has more than 25 million users — a neat reminder that AI’s most bankable trick still looks a lot like “take notes, but better.” Big LLMs also show up, but in bounded roles such as research, drafting, and brainstorming, plus sourcing work through platforms such as Specter and Harmonic (and newer research tools such as Strawberry when the task gets demanding).
Agents sit in the “interesting, but” bucket. Some investors are experimenting with platforms such as
Lua AI and peers such as Cognosys and Adept to build agents that move through internal tools for pipeline building, pattern-spotting, and quick scenario analysis, even as Gartner estimates more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. But the risk profile is already loud. And a Stanford study found 40% of workers have encountered AI “workslop,” with each episode taking nearly two hours to resolve. For now, here’s where AI’s most reliable wins still live: cleaning up the messes humans insist on creating — and leaving
an undo button within reach. Quartz’s Alex Daniel has more on how investors separate AI time-savers from time bombs. | | | SPONSORED | | Why You
Should Cancel Your Car Insurance | Car insurance rates keep rising — but smart drivers aren’t overpaying.
Here’s the deal: Smarter Auto’s free comparison tool lets you check coverage in minutes and unlock ongoing access to lower rates. Drivers report saving more than $600/year after switching. | | |
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