The year-end is the proper time to look back at the past events.
This decade has been full of them: the pandemic and lockdown, inflation and economic crises, elections and assassinations, street unrest and wars. The year 2025 – with US elections, AI focus, tariff war, and peace negotiations – proved to be another eventful year for the economy.
The rule of thumb is that any event, good or bad, depresses the economy. People react negatively, reducing their financial activity in both volume and direction. In its turn, the authorities try to chill the situation by lending, manipulating interest rates, and delivering optimistic news. Here, we’ll take a look at whether tech geeks react differently to the events.
Who are these tech geeks? In our case, they are investing in digital assets, stocks of tech companies, using crypto platforms, etc. Their typical profile: male, age 18-34, with upper-middle income, urban living, risk-tolerant, short-term investor.
What’s in common between the financial reactions of tech geeks and others?
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First, tech geeks, like others, tend to react negatively to political and economic events. For instance, the US tariff increases in early 2025 negatively impacted the stock performance of tech and other companies. Both the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the S&P 500 indexes declined. Other examples of political events, such as street protests and wars, also illustrate this.
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Second, tech geeks, as well as other investors, are more sensitive to interest rates than to news about extreme events, such as war. Correlation analysis of TV war news ranking and interest rate fluctuations at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, along with financial behavior, showed that. As well as positive reactions of tech stocks on the hopes of interest rate cuts in 2025.
Where is the tech geeks’ reaction different?
Obviously, in 2025, tech geeks' financial reactions were sensitive to AI news. The Chinese DeepSeek LLM, launched in January 2025, led to a drop in US tech stocks. The most vulnerable were tech companies in such industries as data center cooling and heating, semiconductors, energy providers and equipment, server makers, and cloud computing. In the second half of 2025, AI optimism drove tech stocks up. Meanwhile, the stock performance of other companies was less influenced by AI news.
Another feature of tech geeks is that they show quicker and more negative short-term reactions to events than other market players. However, tech geeks also adapt to events more quickly and tend to have a more positive long-term financial response. This was observed by comparing reactions to different political events from 12,000 debt tokens and 56,000 individuals' bank deposits.
To conclude, in 2025, an eventful economy has become more tech-oriented, driven by tech news, and dependent on tech geeks' financial behavior with its differences.
