Global markets ride Al, interest rate roller coaster in 2024

Despite political upheavals, stock markets and bitcoin smashed records in 2024, fuelled by investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI), falling interest rates, and hopes of tax cuts.

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Here are four of the most remarkable aspects of 2024 for financial markets:

Stock records fall like dominoes

Wall Street's three main stock indices blew past record highs to set new peaks in 2024, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbing above 45,000 points, the S&P 500 above 6,000 and the Nasdaq Composite above 20,000.

"It was an exceptional year, driven by the performance of tech shares thanks to artificial intelligence," said Christopher Dembik, senior investment advisor at Pictet Asset Management.

The Dow ended the year up by around 13 percent, while the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, which have more tech stocks, notched annual gains of over 23 percent and around 29 percent respectively.

Shares in Nvidia, which makes processors particularly adept at running AI models, including applications such as ChatGPT, rose more than 170 percent in 2024.

"It's now been about two years that ChatGPT was launched and it's been two years that the AI buzz pushed some US Big Tech companies to the sky," said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bank.

"Nvidia, which has become the icon of the AI rally, gained almost 1,000 percent since then, the Magnificent Seven nearly 100 percent since last November," she added.