‘Queen City’ Charlotte was the king of the stock market in 2025

Lithium and steel outshined A.I. in 2025, at least when it comes to CNBC’s exclusive Power City Indexes.

The Power City Indexes (PCI) were built ten years ago. The ‘indexes’ are made up from the 11 or 12 largest market cap companies in 36 different city and metro areas around America.  The stocks are equally weighted in each index and tracked through the year on FactSet.

The PCIs are an easy and exclusive way to find out which city or metro area is “winning” the stock market.   We highlight them through the year on CNBC and also bring them to you on CNBC Pro.

They are meant more for fun, but we take them seriously.  

Here’s how we do it.  We base the city location on a company’s headquarter location via a stock screener on S&P CapitalIQ.  Even if a company has more people in a different area, it is the location of the headquarters that matters for the PCI.  We use the median return for all 11 or 12 stocks.  And if a company is bought, the stock stays in the index until it delists, and then is replaced by the next largest company.

Formalities now out of the way, let’s have some fun and look at the median return for each region.

The third best metro area for the stock market in 2025 was around our nation’s capital. 

Washington, D.C. listed companies — which includes those based in the city itself and those in the surrounding Virginia and Maryland suburbs — posted a solid year.  Defense contractors were an offensive play for investors, with RTX (RTX), General Dynamics (GD), Northrop Grumman (NOC) and Boeing (BA) all popping.  

It wasn’t that long ago that all of these companies would’ve been represented in a different city’s index, but over the past decade or so, they’ve all moved to be closer to the Pentagon and halls of power.

Coming in second in our 2025 Power City Index ranking: Silicon Valley. 

Given the hope and hype around A.I., perhaps the only real surprise here was that the metro area’s market didn’t win the whole thing.  Still, it was a nice year for investors up and down the US 101 corridor. 

The biggest winner in 2025 goes to the Queen City of Charlotte, North Carolina.  

The Charlotte PCI rose more than 22%, topping big tech by just over half a percent. Charlotte didn’t have one stock that doubled, but it had seven big companies see their stocks rise more than 20%, pushing up the median return.  Big gains in lithium miner Albemarle (ALB), aerospace company Curtiss-Wright (CW), SPX Tech (SPXC), Nucor (NU) and Bank of America (BAC) were the secret sauce to Charlotte’s success this year and drove the area to victory in 2025 (a reference to the area’s heavy NASCAR presence).   

So a big congratulations and happy new year to Charlotte for having its Power City Index win the year in 2025.  We look forward to visiting soon.  Maybe even for the Panthers playoff game.

And while we like to stay positive, it would be remiss to not note that the “Big D” stood for “dud” in 2025.   The worst performing Power City Index belonged to Dallas, Texas, with a median return of negative 10%.   Dallas has a lot of good things going for it, but the stock market wasn’t one of them this year.   

We look forward to following the country and its regional stock markets again next year.   Who knows, maybe we will even show up and do some CNBC TV from whichever region takes the crown.