March Madness!
Hello Boodle members! Welcome to the March 2025 edition of the boodle blog. If you’re new here, we welcome you, and if you are a returning member, we appreciate your business. At boodle we believe the person best qualified to manage and grow your money is you, and we teach you how to do this task without the help of a financial advisor or broker!
So, we now have 2 months of 2025 under our belts, and so far, it’s been a near wash if you judge strictly using the year-to-date returns. Let’s take a look at the numbers.
Year to Date, the DOW is up 3.05% and the S&P 500 has a 1.24% advance. The laggard so far this year is the tech-heavy NASDAQ which has lost 2.40% for the year.
For the month of February, the DOW lost 1.05% and the S&P 500 fell by 1.42%. Once again, it’s the NASDAQ taking it on the chin with a 3.97% loss. Boodle will dig a bit deeper into the 2025 performance, and offer our opinion on the sluggishness in stock market performance, and what we think might happen going forward.
In 2024 A.i. drove the market, notably the NASDAQ higher. In the S&P 500 the 7 stocks, known as the “Magnificent Seven- Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Tesla accounted for 50% of the gains in that index! Now that a new administration is in the White House, and the Federal Reserve has paused rate cuts, the market is hesitant to produce any meaningful advance at this time.
Boodle believes that for now, our clients should take a look at their portfolios, and pay close attention to their technology holdings. If you see a greater percentage of your holdings in technology stocks, Boodle would suggest that you re-balance your portfolio to a more moderate stance, i.e. less technology in your portfolios.
Remember, at Boodle we believe that any individual stock in your portfolio-technology or otherwise, should constitute no more than 4% of your total portfolio. As an example, if your portfolio value is $10,000.00 dollars in value, then your individual stock holding should be around $400.00. This way, if you suffer a decline of 50% in that 1 stock, you will only lose 2% of your money. If you need more of an explanation on this concept, go to the “Contact Us” page on this site, and send us your question.
Keep in mind that we are just in the second month of the Trump administration, and if you have been watching the news, his Presidency is pretty much opposite from the 4 years we saw under President Biden. Boodle members should adhere to the strategy of Dollar-Cost-Averaging on a regular basis into their chosen equities (stocks/mutual funds) in their portfolios, and our advice is to watch less news at this time. We believe that as shocking & surprising as the news has been lately, nothing we have seen has shaken our 27-year view that the U.S. Stock Market is the ideal place to invest, and you couldn’t ask for a better company than Boodle, to help you navigate the twist & turns of the economy, politics, and the market! That’s it for now, and we hope to see you back here next month for all things financial. Enjoy your month.