2024: A Triumph!

Happy New Year and welcome to the January 2025 edition of the Boodle blog! If this is your first visit, we thank you for joining us, and if you're a returning member- welcome back!
Well, we made it to the end of 2024, a historic, record-setting year and definitely one for the history books. Since this is the January boodle blog, we will take a look back at the month of December, and the year to date returns of our clients’ portfolios.
The political puzzle pieces are now in place, and we know that Donald Trump will occupy the Whitehouse for the next four years. It was a hard-fought race, but with just 104 days to construct a campaign, Vice-President Harris was quite simply outmaneuvered.
Trump sees his win as a "mandate" from the voters, and he has promised to hit the ground running to enact his agenda. Boodle will opine more on the Trump administration influence on the economy in the coming weeks and upcoming editions of the Boodle blog.
Now, we will turn our attention to the performance of the 2024 stock market and also offer a glimpse into how our clients portfolio holdings did for the year (we won't include symbols, just performance).As you can tell by the title of this blog, the highly-anticipated Santa Claus rally, failed to materialize, and although that failure was a bit disappointing, it didn't blunt the impact of what turned out to be a triumphant year for boodle investors.
For 2024, the DOW advanced 12.80% ytd and was down -4.83% for December. The S&P 500 added 23.31% for the year and gave back -2.78% for December. The tech-heavy NASDAQ won the yearly performance with a 28.64% return and fell just 0.78% in December.
When the average historical return on the market is 11%, we think these numbers are outstanding, and we know our clients are pleased and we are thrilled to have guided them to these returns. On individual holdings, our clients experienced returns of 35.28%, 43.51%, 23.94%, 34.41%, 87.73%, 62.52%, 171.17*%.
Boodle's strategy played out in 2024, even better than we could have imagined! Take a look at the February 2024 blog when we stated, "the year 2024 will prove to be a year that will reward the patient investor" and check out the March 2024 blog when we stated, " based on our research, we believe that future gains are very much possible".
These pontifications are only possible because of our 26 years of in-depth market analysis and our resolve to make sure that our client portfolios are always in the positive and never below water. As always, your role is to read and educate yourselves, here at the blog and through any reading materials that boodle suggests for our members such as books, and online resources. The year 2024 turned out to be a very good year for our clients, and we hope that you are pleased with your results. Boodle can't always promise that you can expect a double-digit or even a triple digit return, but what we can promise is that you will always come first here at boodle, and we will never let your portfolio suffer with meager gains. You will want to visit the boodle blog next month when we offer our annual expectations on what we believe will be in store for investors in the 2025 year, and how they can best take advantage of our research to position their portfolios that will meet their expectations. As always, if there is anyone who you feel could benefit from learning about becoming a new or better investor, send them here, and they can use our "Contact Us" page to reach us, or just call 815-793-6059 any time of the day or evening (central time) and we will be happy to discuss portfolio options with them. January through March is the perfect time to get started, so why put it off? We can get you started immediately!

Enjoy the new year, and thank you for choosing boodle!