There’s still a week left, but we can confidently speak about 2023 in the past tense.

It was a good year for assets. There’s more than a little bitterness about that.

For some, equities’ stupendous performance was a travesty of sorts. An affront to the US recession that wasn’t. And the absence of a downturn was itself a slight: “I was told there would be a recession.”

If you notice, the mea culpas sound suspiciously like sarcastic excuses: “We failed to anticipate the potential for a viral chatbot to override the drag from aggressive monetary tightening.” And so on.

2023 was night and day versus 2022. Thanks in no small part to the November/December “everything rally,” this was a year during which assets of all sorts notched respectable gains, no small feat considering cash was more viable as an asset class than it’s been in some younger investors’ adult lifetimes.

Commodities were the only exception. Headed into the final few sessions of the year, raw materials had a small loss, a stark turnaround from 2022’s blockbuster, war-driven gains.

Note that it was a record flows year both for cash and Treasurys. Money market funds were the flows story, taking in more than $1.3 trillion, as high yields were a cash magnet amid generalized risk aversion (which persisted despite recurring equity melt-ups).

Treasurys, meanwhile, raked in $177 billion. Suffice to say dip-buying in US government bonds was pervasive. And costly. Until November, when it finally started to pay off.

Elsewhere, IG credit took in $162 billion and global equities more than $152 billion.

Although US equity-focused ETFs and mutual funds saw a net $10.5 billion of outflows over the latest weekly reporting period on EPFR’s data, they still managed to take in a net $85 billion for 2023. Not too bad considering net flows were negative to the tune of almost $70 billion prior to Nvidia’s Q1 report.

A popular gauge of individual investor bullishness hit its highest levels of 2023 just before Christmas.

There’s a generic holiday joke here about bears and lumps of coal, but I’m not much for cheap punchlines.