BALTIMORE – The big news today is that the Dow has hit a new record of over 25,000.

We’ll get to that in a minute… we’re still looking over our shoulders at last year’s performance.

Let’s see, the top-performing U.S. stock market sector last year was technology.

An investment in the top 100 Nasdaq stocks went up 34%.

Then came a list of also-rans – from the Dow (up 28%)… to the S&P 500 (up 22%)… to the energy sector (down 4%)… all the way down to the worst-performing sector, natural gas (down 44%).

Our Reversion to the Mean (R2tM) portfolio gained 33% last year – not bad for such a simple strategy.

Buy Low, Sell High

Our R2tM strategy is so basic anyone could do it.

You look for the worst-performing stock markets in the world and buy them. Then you count on the fact that what goes down is likely to go back up.

At the start of last year, for instance, Russia, Poland, and Italy were among the cheapest major stock markets in the world.

As it turned out, in 2017, Polish stocks (up 55% in U.S. dollar terms) and Italian stocks (up 29% in U.S. dollar terms) were among the most profitable investments.

The Russian market was up just 2%. But heck, two out of three ain’t bad.

Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? Buy low, sell high; not the other way around.

Which is a way of backing into the third of our three most remarkable surprises of 2017 – the dizzying rise of bitcoin and other cryptos.

If any “asset class” has a claim to being top dog for the year, it is cryptos.

Bitcoin rose 1,300% last year – or about 42 times more than the Nasdaq 100.

But in the racy crypto field, bitcoin ran as though it had a broken leg. The third most valuable crypto by market value, Ethereum, was up 8,900%.

And get this: The No. 2 crypto by market value, Ripple, rose 36,000%.

And when we picked up the newspaper on Tuesday, we discovered that Ripple had gone up 50% in a single day!