The Future of Investing: Rethinking 'Best Investments' for 2025 and Beyond

The End of an Era You Didn't Even Notice

When I first read the news that Fidelity Investments was shuttering a handful of its themed ETFs—funds for Digital Health, Women's Leadership, and Sustainability—I wasn't surprised. Honestly, I was a little sad, because it felt like watching the end of an era. An era of what I call “story investing.” The idea was noble: you could put your money not just into a company, but into a narrative you believed in. You weren't just buying stocks; you were backing a better, healthier, more equitable future. It was a beautiful idea.

And it is, apparently, failing.

The quiet liquidation of these funds, set for late 2025—the subject of the announcement Fidelity Investments® Announces Liquidation of Five Exchange-Traded Funds—isn’t some cataclysmic market event. It won't make the front page. But it’s a symptom of a much deeper, more profound shift in our economy. We're witnessing the slow-motion collapse of investing in ideas and the violent, spectacular rise of investing in infrastructure. While we were busy trying to find the best investments by picking feel-good themes, we missed the tectonic plates moving beneath our feet. We were betting on which car model would sell best next year, while a handful of visionaries were building the engine that would power all of them.

This isn’t just about a few underperforming funds from Fidelity Investments. It’s a warning shot. What do you do when the stories you’ve been telling yourself about value no longer hold up? Where do you turn when the very definition of a "good investment" is being rewritten in real-time?

The New Engine of Creation

Enter Jensen Huang. The leather-jacketed CEO of Nvidia isn’t just selling graphics cards anymore; he’s selling the picks and shovels for a new gold rush. And he just pointed directly at the biggest vein of gold any of us have ever seen. In a recent chat, he called OpenAI “one of the smartest investments we can possibly imagine,” predicting it will be the next “multi-trillion-dollar hyperscale company.”

Let that sink in. He’s not talking about a hot startup. He’s putting OpenAI in the same category as Amazon and Meta. He calls it a 'hyperscale' company—which is just a technical way of saying a business built to serve billions of people with digital intelligence, a foundational utility for the modern world. When the man who builds the hardware that powers the entire AI revolution tells you where the center of gravity is shifting, you listen. This isn't just about another app or a faster website, this is about rewiring the very foundation of how we create, how we solve problems, how we discover new medicines, and how we build economies—the scale of this is so massive it’s almost hard to wrap your head around.

This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place. It’s a paradigm shift. For decades, the best investments were in companies that built great products on top of existing platforms. Now, the generational wealth, the real, transformative value, is being created at the platform level itself. Nvidia builds the computational bedrock—the silicon foundation. OpenAI is building the intelligence layer that runs on top of it.

Think of it like the dawn of electricity. For centuries, the best investments might have been in companies that made the finest whale-oil lamps or the most efficient candles. But then the grid came online. Suddenly, the only investment that truly mattered was in the generation and distribution of electricity itself. Everything else—the lightbulbs, the radios, the factories—was just an application running on that new, foundational power. Thematic ETFs, in this analogy, are the fancy candle makers. Jensen Huang is telling us to invest in the power plant.

Of course, with this much power comes immense responsibility. We have to be thoughtful about how we build and deploy these systems to ensure they benefit everyone, not just a select few. The ethical guardrails we build now will define the next century. But ignoring the sheer force of this change isn't caution; it's denial.

Even the sagely advice of Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, starts to sound like wisdom from a different century. His famous line, “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful,” is brilliant for a cyclical market. But what happens when the market isn't in a cycle, but in a metamorphosis? What if the "fear" and "greed" are both pointed at the wrong things? His plea to avoid "excitement and expenses" makes sense for preserving wealth, but it completely misses the moments where excitement is the only rational response to a fundamental disruption. The biggest risk today isn't volatility; it's irrelevance.

The Only Question That Matters Now

So, as we look toward 2025 and beyond, the old playbooks are being torn up. The era of neatly packaged "story" investments is fading, replaced by a raw, almost elemental force. The question is no longer about which niche trend will pop or which sector will outperform. It's simpler, and infinitely bigger. Are you investing in the applications, or are you investing in the engine of creation itself? Are you buying the lightbulbs, or are you building the grid? Because one of those is a choice for the past, and the other is a bet on the entire future.