My son Reid has always loved watching Mississippi State Baseball. He and I have watched countless games on the ESPN app going back to when he was 3 or 4. Reid and I made the trip out early Wednesday morning to see game 3 of the College World Series Final. What a memory with a kid that loves baseball!
Chris Lemonis, head baseball coach of Mississippi State talked often about how resilient and tough this year’s team was. While those attributes are common amongst most championship teams, they are also extremely important for long term, goal focused investors…..like us.
Over the last 18 challenging months, staying with our plan has taken toughness and resiliency on your part. As your financial coach, I believe it is worth restating our belief system regarding the general principles of successful, long-term investing:
- We believe that acting continuously on a rational plan- as opposed to reacting to current events- offers us the opportunity for long-term investment success. Simply stated: unless our goals change, we see little reason to alter our financial plan. If our portfolio is well suited to that plan, we don’t often make significant changes to that, either.
- We do not believe the economy can be consistently forecast, nor the markets consistently timed. We’re therefore convinced that the most reliable way to capture the long-term return of equities is to ride out their frequent but ultimately temporary declines.
On February 19, 2020- the market’s peak just before the pandemic took hold- the S&P 500 closed at 3,386. It then proceeded to decline 34% in 33 days, amid the worst global health crisis in a century. If you bought the Index at the February 2020 top, and were still holding it on June 30th of this year, your total return with re-invested dividends has been close to 28%. I’ve never seen- and don’t expect to ever see again- a more vivid demonstration of Peter Lynch’s quote that “The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.”
I believe I am your advisor for just that reason: to help you not get scared out of them. Thank you for being our clients. Thank you for your toughness and resilience. It is a privilege to serve you and our team looks forward to doing so for many years to come.
Sincerely,
Bain Nickels, CKA®
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is a capitalization weighted index of 500 stocks designed to measure performance of the broad domestic economy through changes in the aggregate market value of 500 stocks representing all major industries.
S&P 500 is an unmanaged index which cannot be invested into directly. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
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