November 2025 in returns

November 2025 was a crypto bear market with the equity indices standing almost perfectly still. Bitcoin fell 17.6%, Ethereum 22.2% and Solana 28.7%, with 48 of 179 coins (27%) green — while the S&P 500 finished up 0.1%, the Dow 0.3% and the FTSE 100 exactly flat. Beneath that placid surface, though, equities were doing something violent of their own: Nvidia fell 12.6% and the AI-infrastructure complex was taken apart. CoreWeave -45.3%, Super Micro -34.9%, MicroStrategy -34.3%, Rocket Lab -33.1%, AST SpaceMobile -30.0%, Nebius -27.5%, Axon -26.2%.

That list is worth dwelling on, because it is very nearly the same list that led May, June and October. The market did not rotate out of AI in November so much as it stopped paying for the leveraged, pre-revenue and balance-sheet-geared expressions of it. What it kept buying was the profitable physical layer: Lumentum +61.3%, Albemarle +32.3%, Tower Semiconductor +26.9%, Coherent +24.5% — optics, lithium and chips, with Eli Lilly (+24.8%) providing defensive ballast and gold adding 5.4%. Flat indices concealing a 45% drawdown in the most crowded names is not calm; it is a market rebuilding its foundations while the scoreboard is held still.