The End of the Easy US Stock Bet Has Been Good to Contrarians

On Wall Street, it’s been years since anyone had to think very hard to make money. Buy the largest US stocks, ignore everything else and watch your portfolio soar. Investing was reduced to one-click simplicity.

Then life got more complicated. President Donald Trump’s sudden tariff escalation in April offered a glimpse of what a world without that certainty might look like. Confidence wavered—not just in megacap resilience, but in American economic exceptionalism and Trump’s market-friendly reputation. But after a sharp market decline, some of the panic subsided. The president backed away from some of his most dramatic tariff plans, and major US equity ...