Here's something that probably didn't make it into your year-end portfolio recap: while President Donald Trump promised a "golden age of America," the real action was happening in Peru and South Korea.

One year into Trump's return to the White House, U.S. equities did fine. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) gained 12.5%, which is perfectly respectable. But two country-specific ETFs absolutely demolished that performance, posting returns that outpaced the S&P 500 by almost 90 percentage points.

We're talking about the iShares MSCI Peru And Global Exposure ETF (EPU), which surged 106%, and the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (EWY), which climbed nearly 100%. Those aren't typos. These markets essentially doubled while most American investors were focused on domestic stocks.

The interesting part? These two markets took completely different roads to get there. Peru rode a commodity supercycle. South Korea surfed the AI wave. Same massive returns, totally different stories.

Peru's Metals-Fueled Moonshot

Peru's rally is what happens when geopolitical chaos meets a resource-rich economy. Persistent tensions, trade conflicts, and war risks have pushed investors toward hard assets, and Peru's stock market is basically a leveraged bet on exactly those assets.

The country's equity market is heavily weighted toward basic materials and precious metals producers. When commodity prices took off, Peru's market went with them. Gold jumped more than 75% over the past year. Silver rocketed about 210%. Copper climbed roughly 33%. For an economy built on digging valuable stuff out of the ground, that's basically perfect conditions.

Look at EPU's top 10 holdings and you'll see the pattern immediately. Eight of the ten are materials companies, and every single one of them posted triple-digit gains that tracked almost perfectly with rising metal prices.

Southern Copper Corp. (SCCO), the ETF's largest holding at 23.79%, gained 100.8%. Compañía de Minas Buenaventura S.A.A. (BVN) surged 197%. Volcan Compañía Minera S.A.A. absolutely exploded with a 310% gain. MMG Ltd. (MMLTF) climbed 243%. Hochschild Mining plc (HCHDF) jumped 165%.

You get the idea. When silver goes up 210%, silver miners tend to do quite well.

Even the financial stocks in the top holdings did great. Credicorp Ltd (BAP), the second-largest holding at 21.60%, gained 89%. Intercorp Financial Services Inc. (IFS) rose 61%. When your economy is booming because commodity prices are soaring, the banks financing all that activity benefit too.

Other major winners included Pan American Silver Corp. (PAAS), up 177%, Triple Flag Precious Metals Corp. (TFPM), up 145%, and Wheaton Precious Metals Corp. (WPM), up 146%. This was a broad-based commodity rally, and Peru was positioned perfectly to capture it.

South Korea's Semiconductor Surge

South Korea's outperformance tells a completely different story. Forget commodities. This was all about semiconductors and AI infrastructure demand.

The Korean market surged because global demand for memory chips overwhelmed supply, particularly in high-bandwidth and advanced memory used in AI data centers. Supply constraints pushed orders years into the future, which meant manufacturers could raise prices and watch margins expand while revenues climbed sharply.

Here's the concentration risk part: nearly 70% of EWY's annual gains came from just two stocks. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd (SSNLF) rose 180%, and SK Hynix Inc. jumped 260%. Together, these two companies account for 45% of the ETF's total weight.

When two stocks make up nearly half your portfolio and both post triple-digit returns, your ETF is going to have a very good year. That's exactly what happened with South Korea.

Two Markets, One Outcome

What makes this comparison fascinating is how different the underlying drivers were. Peru's rally was broad-based and commodity-driven, a classic boom in metals and materials tied to inflationary supply shocks and resource demand. It was old-school economics: scarcity drives prices, prices drive profits, profits drive stock returns.

South Korea rode the technology wave, where AI infrastructure demand stretched memory chip capacity to its limits and boosted profits for the country's semiconductor giants. This was new-economy stuff: exponential growth in AI computing needs creating a supply bottleneck that producers exploited brilliantly.

Despite taking completely different paths, both markets arrived at the same destination: near-triple-digit annual returns that crushed U.S. equities by almost 90 percentage points.

So while the "golden age of America" delivered solid gains, investors who looked beyond U.S. borders found golden opportunities elsewhere. Sometimes the best American investment strategy is looking at markets that aren't American at all.