Each year, we pick a handful of investment funds available to Irish investors and highlight them on our blog. We’ve charted below how our 2025 selections performed.
Interested in our 2026 picks? Click here to read more.
2025 was a tricky year to have your money in the stock market. Equity markets were up 6.8% in Euro terms (measured by the MSCI All-Country World Index). In US dollar terms, the figure was a lot higher. But a fall in the value of the dollar vs the Euro of more than 10% – the steepest drop since 2017 – held back returns for Eurozone-based investors. The fabled S&P 500 returned 3.5% to Eurozone-based investors last year.
That makes a 6.8% rise rise look respectable. But the annual figure hides some huge swings during the year. There were also great differences among individual funds. As we said at the start of the year:
1. European and emerging markets looked promising;
2. Interest rate cutting would help bond, equity and property markets; and
3. Geopolitics could make a fundamental difference, and miscalculations by Trump, Xi, and Putin were all possible.
We’ve set out the one-year performance of the funds we recommended at the start of the year in the charts below.
We didn’t get them all right – our core equity choice for dynamic portfolios, JPMorgan Global Growth and Income, was negative. Its US exposures were affected by exchange rate declines, while its lack of exposure to key performers in that market like Alphabet and Broadcom reduced returns, as Investor’s Chronicle has explained recently.
Of course, as this fund is only ever one of several in an investment portfolio at Moneycube, and there were winners too, including Scottish Mortgage, run by the same fund manager and up 18.5% in 2025 in Euro terms, building on more than 23% growth in 2024. This fund’s largest holding, SpaceX, could be particularly interesting in the year ahead as we’ve talked about elsewhere.
And our private equity pick was a real cracker: CT Private Equity rose 15.9% in 2025, bringing its five-year average annual growth to 19.9%. But these returns demanded patience: nearly all of CT PE’s outperformance came in the last month of the year, as the share price chart below shows.
Source: The AIC
As ever, it’s the longer term that really counts. We’ve charted the five-year performance of our 2025 chosen funds below.
As you can see, they have all turned in solid long-term growth. Even the lowest performer here is up around 7% per year over five years. Compare that to half a decade of rock-bottom interest rates in the bank!
