January 2026 in returns

January opened the year with the two asset classes moving in opposite directions, and it set a pattern that would hold for months. Crypto began a bear leg in earnest — Bitcoin fell 10.2%, Ethereum 17.5% and Solana 15.3%, with only 51 of the 194 coins we track (26%) finishing green. Equities did the reverse, and did it quietly: the headline moves were modest (the S&P 500 +1.4%, the Nasdaq +1.0%, the Dow +1.7%) yet 588 of 870 stocks — 68% — closed higher, with the Russell 2000 up 5.3% and Japan's Nikkei 5.9%. The most emphatic move of the month belonged to neither camp: gold rose 12.3%, a defensive bid that would repeat in February and then break down badly in March.

Beneath the calm indices, one trade dominated: memory and storage. Sandisk more than doubled at +142.8%, with Seagate (+48.0%), Micron (+45.4%), Western Digital (+45.2%) and Lam Research (+36.4%) behind it, joined at the speculative end by AST SpaceMobile (+53.1%) and Moderna (+49.4%). What paid for it was software — AppLovin (-29.8%), Atlassian (-27.1%), Intuit (-24.5%) and ServiceNow (-23.6%) all fell hard while the tape rose around them. This was capital moving out of the application layer and into the physical substrate underneath it, and it is worth marking where it started: Sandisk would run again into April, and then finish as July's single worst performer once the memory prices that made it here turned from tailwind into cost. The whole year's arc is legible in this one month, if you knew to look.