Are we there yet?

Not a typical 2025 stock market lookahead

If, like me, you have young children, you will be more than familiar with the classic road trip tropes: Time seemingly taking forever. Boredom seeping through the windows and over the speakers into the brains of the victims. The bathroom that was very much unnecessary minutes before leaving now being the most pressing stage of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

“Ten minutes? That’s going to take ages!”

-My kindergarten aged child, when hearing how much farther it will take to get somewhere, anywhere

This same feeling that all young children feel (and lets be honest, plenty of adults) is eerily similar to watching your stock portfolio. I’m not talking about the volatility and excitement that we feel when we are hyper-fixed on the stock market day-to-day. In this reflection, what I’m talking about is the long term and infrequent digestion of where we are versus where we were. When you have had a year like I have, this is a bit of a dreadful, boring experience. Not because I have lost money (I am up in 2024 but less than the S&P500 index), but rather because it feels like progress is delayed. 2022, like many others, was a down year while 2023 bounced back and 2024 was somewhat muted (while others got rich investing in Nvidia). Meanwhile, when you check in day-to-day or month-to-month it seems like it should be racing all over the place. This is like speeding around city blocks from light to light only to be stuck in traffic and taking detours. It feels exhausting not only for the fits and starts as well as the feeling of lack of progress.

This is of course, a feature, not a bug. When kids master boredom, they are unlocking new skills to deal with real life that will inevitably give them an edge in later life challenges and endeavors. The habit of being overly emotional and compulsive when tackling the first signs of boredom is a bad one. In the modern world, it seems like boredom is something that kids (and adults) struggle to deal with as there are too many compulsions at our fingertips. I had the fortune of growing up in rural place with no internet, no cable tv, and weekly trips to church where we sat quietly for up to an hour. This environment sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to most youngsters (including my own) today. I credit this type of upbringing with my somewhat more than average ability to be patient with things like a stock portfolio.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

-Blaise Pascal, French Philosopher and very bored dude

2025 Stock Market (not)Prediction

Once again, the Gregorian calendar strikes!…

I was recently asked about my thoughts on what “the stock market” (whatever that is) will do in 2025 by a friend at a party. It was innocent small-talk, of course, but it made me cringe briefly before I responded with a “there, there” answer: yeah man, I don’t know.

My poorly hidden disgust about the question was a lot more to do with the framing of the question as opposed to my friends concern over where his net worth may be headed in the next 12 months, which to be a fair is a sensible one for anyone to have. What kind of specific oracle am I to be able to book-end a calendar chart for the future 12 months of a secondary market of listed businesses? There are so many variables, where would even get off having any notion of an opinion on such a thing. I barely have any confidence on the individual names I hold over the short term. Whenever I start thinking I can predict such things, I look no further to the various names that I either still hold or have recently sold that have not worked out thus far. Investing is a game that necessitates some degree of losses; heck even the best are only “right” slightly more than half the time and even then the bulk of their performance is based on a few big winners held for a long time (to each their own about what a “long time” is, by the way).

Anyway, enough fluff. Stay tuned for a proper portfolio update over the next few days. As I have recently mentioned, I have greatly diversified the portfolio recently in preparation for the next stage of my life as I look to hedge my own stupidity and look to change my mindset about going for big returns by concentrating.

Cheers to 2025 and the perpetuation of the sacred and foolish framing of the Gregorian calendar.