April 2025 in returns

April 2025 was the month crypto stopped falling and equities did not quite start rising. 56 of 85 coins finished green (66%) after three miserable months — Bitcoin +14.1%, Solana +18.4% — and the recovery was led by exactly the speculative names that had been destroyed: Pudgy Penguins +105.7%, Bonk +73.1%, Raydium +64.0%, Artificial Superintelligence Alliance +62.7%, Sui +54.6%, Floki +52.4%. Equities offered no such relief. The Dow fell 3.2% and the Russell 2000 2.4%, only 372 of 868 stocks (43%) closed higher, and the S&P 500's 0.8% slip flattered a tape where most things still went down.

Where equities did work, they worked for reasons unconnected to the AI trade: Palantir +40.3%, MicroStrategy +31.9%, Comfort Systems +23.3%, CrowdStrike +21.6%, GE Vernova +21.6% and Netflix +21.4%. The losers were energy and healthcare — APA -24.9%, Halliburton -21.9%, UnitedHealth -21.4% — with Sandisk down 32.6%, worth noting only because that name would spend the next twelve months as one of the most violent round trips in this record. April is the least tidy month of 2025: the risk appetite had returned, but only to the assets that had fallen furthest, and the broad market was still refusing to follow.