November Market Recap: AI Adoption Surges & Tight Liquidity Creates Opportunity

Key Takeaways

• Liquidity stress tightened markets, with Bitcoin leading risk-asset weakness as the earliest barometer.
• AI signals shifted from infrastructure build-out toward real enterprise adoption.
• Real assets outperformed as late-cycle macro meets early-cycle technology demand.

The views expressed are for illustrative purposes only, subject to change without notice, do not constitute investment advice or recommendations, and are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of VanEck or its other employees. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

November showed how fast sentiment can flip when liquidity gets scarce. As we’ve come to expect, as funding costs rose and repo markets showed, the most sensitive assets were the first to get hit. Bitcoin dropped nearly 30% from its October high before stabilizing. High-growth tech stocks corrected about 10%. Timing told the real story: Bitcoin began rolling over on October 6, while the tech sector’s meaningful leg down didn’t begin until October 29. That three-week lead is why we treat Bitcoin as the market’s earliest liquidity barometer: when the plumbing begins to clog, it leaks first.

We used the sell-off to add.

Bitcoin: A Signal For Tech Stocks

Source: Bloomberg, as of 11/30/2025. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

On November 21, as Bitcoin touched its low, our models flagged a clear mean-reversion setup: the decline was too sharp relative to its own history and too disconnected from the rest of the portfolio. We increased exposure when fear was peaking. That’s exactly what the process is designed to do.

Alongside the liquidity dynamics, November provided steady, incremental signals pointing toward a shift in the AI cycle from Phase 1 (infrastructure) into Phase 2 (adoption).

The Framework

• Phase 1: Chips, data centers, power: the build-out
• Phase 2: AI embedded in actual products and workflows: real revenue
• Phase 3: Automation and robotics at scale: labor transformation Two verifiable developments stood out:
• Cisco raised full-year guidance on continued AI-driven networking demand.
• CrowdStrike lifted its outlook after sustained enterprise take-up of its AI-native security platform.

These are not explosive moves, but they are consistent with the transition from experimentation to deployment. A recent Economist article highlighted just how wide the gap remains between “we have an AI subscription” and “AI is embedded in production workflows.”

That gap is the hallmark of the productivity J-curve: friction today, bigger payoff later. We remain positioned for the latter.

Source: The Economist, as of 2025.

Late-Cycle Backdrop, Early-Cycle Technology

The tension is obvious: an early-cycle technology boom is running head-first into a late-cycle economy.

Circular AI revenue, onshoring costs, tariffs, geopolitical friction, a shrinking middle class, and political gridlock that shows no sign of ending. The root cause is simple: the system is working for some, not most. That divergence showed up at the ballot box on November 4, with economic worries driving record turnout in the NYC mayoral race — where Zohran Mamdani won on a platform of rent freezes and affordability — and Democratic sweeps in Virginia and New Jersey, as voters punished the status quo for persistent inflation and job stagnation.

AI will drive productivity and growth. But first it will displace knowledge workers. Later, when robotics scale, the impact spreads vastly wider. Public debt in that environment becomes an even larger problem.

Real Asset Backbone Behind AI Adoption

There is another story developing beneath the surface: old-world assets are quietly building the new world. A diversified basket of real-asset companies, aka the businesses powering infrastructure, energy, industrial metals, transportation, and manufacturing, is outperforming the Nasdaq 100 Index year-to-date.

Real Assets: The Bull Market Nobody Is Paying Attention To

Source: FactSet, as of 11/30/2025. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

The next decade of AI, automation, and reshoring simply cannot happen without this backbone. Data centers need power. Robotics need materials. Supply chains need redundancy. Innovation needs infrastructure. And the bill for all of it is being financed through monetary dilution and persistent fiscal deficits. This is why we continue to own real assets for upside participation — and gold to protect against the debasement that ultimately pays for the next wave of growth.

Debt and Liquidity: Stress, Not Panic

Roughly $9.2 trillion in U.S. Treasuries mature in 2025; a large but manageable rolling refinancing task. During the post-COVID period, the Treasury shifted issuance toward short-term bills, doubling T-Bills’ share of the Treasuries market from ~12% in 2015 to ~22% by 2025. The move has effectively served as a form of yield-curve control by flooding the front end and compressing long-term rates.

The trade-off is more frequent rollovers and greater sensitivity to liquidity swings.

Bills Make Up More Than 20% of Treasuries Market

Source: Bloomberg, as of 2025.

The Treasury General Account (TGA) adds another important layer to the picture. The Treasury built up a sizable cash balance, funded predominantly through bill issuance, which drained a significant amount of reserves from the banking system over the course of the year.

That tightening became most visible in the repo markets. Toward the end of November, funding pressures surfaced: repo rates climbed, SOFR briefly moved above the Fed’s target range, and strains appeared in parts of the financial plumbing.

In response, the Federal Reserve brought its Treasury QT runoff to an earlier end than many had anticipated and made clear it was paying close attention to funding conditions. It wasn’t a crisis—just a sharp reminder that liquidity still matters, and the most sensitive parts of the money markets feel it first.

How We Handled November

• Increased Bitcoin when sellers panicked
• Remained positioned in companies delivering measurable AI adoption
• Continued to benefit from reshoring and real-asset exposure
• Gold worked again: up over 5% in the month, now above $4,200 after starting last December below $2,600

The Bottom Line

There’s no going back.

We are in a new regime: governments will debase currency to service yesterday’s debt and fund tomorrow’s ambitions. At the same time, extreme innovation, led by AI, is rewriting productivity, profitability, and power.

We believe the winning portfolio owns both sides of that equation:

• Assets that potentially protect and profit from debasement (Bitcoin, gold, real assets)
• Companies and themes that may capture the capex surge and the productivity explosion

Diversification across these forces is no longer optional. It is the new foundation for generating returns in a world that is changing fast.

Macro themes we’re watching:

Today’s predominant macro forces are driving the key themes and exposures in VanEck’s models, including the core allocation of the VanEck Wealth Builder Plus Portfolios. The allocations below are representative of the Moderate Portfolio.

Source: VanEck, 11/30/2025. Not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities or digital assets, or as investment or any call to action.

Standardized Performance

Source: VanEck. As of 11/30/2025. Returns greater than 1 year are annualized. The performance data quoted represents past performance. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Performance may be lower or higher than performance data quoted. Performance figures presented herein are preliminary and may differ slightly from final performance figures. Fees paid represent acquired fund fees of the underlying funds held by the Strategies. Please contact us at [email protected] for additional information.