2025: Our Clients Win Again!
Hello everyone!
Happy New Year and welcome to the boodle blog! If this is your first time here, we are grateful to have you as a client. If you are a returning member, we thank you for placing your continued trust in us.
At boodle, we believe that the person most qualified to manage and grow your money is you, and we teach you how to do it successfully using our 27 years of financial insight & knowledge.
Well, 2025 is officially in the record books and for our clients, it was another successful year to be a boodle member and the numbers bear this out.
December failed to produce a “Santa Claus Rally” where the market rises a few percentage points to close out the year. We didn’t see Santa on Wallstreet this year, but all in all, 2025 offered our clients some positive returns that we will share with you right after we get to the year to date financial stats.
For the month of December the DOW eked out a tiny fractional gain of 0.38% and the S&P 500 was essentially flat while losing 0.06%. The NASDAQ suffered a 0.90% loss which wasn’t totally unexpected.
To put those December numbers into some perspective, the year-to-date numbers were quite different. The DOW gained 12.97% and the S&P 500 which is our measuring index for the market gained 16.39%, while the NASDAQ won the year with a 20.36% return.
Boodle’s research told us that with a Republican in the White House, volatility would be an event to be aware of, and that’s exactly what we saw in 2025. President Trump enacted his tariff policy and portfolios everywhere started to tumble. We had members tell us that they had lost thousands of dollars and that they were fearful that the gains that they had enjoyed would not return.
We took a different stance than many of our clients and all of our competitors because we believed that the volatility could actually produce some interesting buying opportunities, and sure enough, that’s exactly what played out throughout 2025.
We didn’t see anything that flashed a recession warning and one reason that negative signal didn’t materialize is because we didn’t see the Fed raising interest rates, and as a matter of fact, the Fed was early on record as saying that rate cuts were very possible and we got 3 cuts in 2025.
The Trump administration frightens many investors, but at boodle we seek opportunity and not fear. We went through so many administrations that we have learned what to look for when making rational investment decisions, and if you remain a boodle member you will see financial rewards in your portfolio over time.
Some of our biggest gains were found in semi-conductors (42.90%), streaming companies, and of course, broad-based low fee index funds (18.69%). Our 27 years of investing knowledge is a real asset and we leverage these assets to help you grow their money as they grow their knowledge about investing.
Now that 2025 is over, we will spend many working hours analyzing what might lie ahead for our clients in 2026. You as our client will get our annual view of what the new year may have in store for investors of equities and fixed income. Have a safe & financially rewarding 2026.