The Long Term Investor

WOW.....over the last two hours a strong medium gain....became a nice BIG gain for me today in my stocks. I had four stocks leading the way....MSFT, COST, NVDA, and PLTR. I also beat the SP500 by 0.85% today.

A new all time high for me and a great way to end the month of September. ON to the final quarter of the year.

 

The record breaking close today.

Dow hits record, S&P 500, Nasdaq cap best Q3 since 2020 as Wall Street braces for shutdown

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live...all-street-braces-for-shutdown-200013623.html

"The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) rose 0.2%, notching a fresh closing record. The S&P 500 (^GSPC) rose 0.4%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) gained 0.3%, coming off modest closing gains on Wall Street.

Both the Nasdaq and S&P 500 notched their best third quarter since 2020 and their best September performance since 2010."

BOOM.

 

Great job Lori....with your investing.

I think a lot of us are in the same situation as you with NVDA and PLTR. At times I also look at those two positions and how they have come to DOMINATE my portfolio. I also think....I should take some profits and re-balance some of that money.

BUT......I cant stand the thought of the capital gains taxes. I also look at those two companies and I see a very GOLDEN future for both over the next 3-6 years....perhaps even decades. So I just.....like you....decided to let them run and not be sitting around in five or ten years whining about not letting them run and grow in my account....and all the money I lost.

PLUS.....I like the other positions that I own....but I dont see moving that money into my other stocks when I HONESTLY think the future is much brighter for NVDA and somewhat for PLTR.

CLASSIC......no guts, no glory.....situation I guess.

 

It has been an EPIC run for stocks and the markets over the last 15 years.....2009 to 2025. In many of those years the SP50 returns are way above tthe historic average. Only TWO red years over that entire time.

Here are those returns:


Total Return - percentate

2025 +14.83
2024 +25.02
2023 +26.29
2022 (-18.11
2021 +28.71
2020 +18.40
2019 +31.49
2018 (-4.38
2017 +21.83
2016 +11.96
2015 +1.38
2014 +13.69
2013 +32.39
2012 +16.00
2011 +2.11
2010 +15.06
2009 +26.46

 

As to the above:

Why is the Stock Market Up So Much in the 2020s?

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/09/why-is-the-stock-market-up-so-much-in-the-2020s/

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"Author James Playsted Wood once wrote, “The thing that most affects the stock market is everything.”

The list does seem endless when you start ticking off the factors that influence stock market returns over time.

Headlines, geopolitical events, economic growth, government policies, human emotions, investor positioning, interest rates, inflation, risk appetite, demographics, quarterly earnings reports and the list could go on.

In the 2010s most people assumed low interest rates and quantitative easing were propping up the stock market. In the early-2020s it was government spending. Right now it feels like the AI boom is powering everything.

It’s always something.

But if you really want to know what’s been driving the U.S. stock market higher look no further than earnings.

This becomes apparent when you look at the composition of stock market returns by decade:



What’s driving the stock market during this bull market?

Earnings!

In the 2010s we had annual earnings growth of nearly 11%. Earnings have grown at just shy of 10% per year in the 2020s. That’s much higher than the long-term average of around 5% per year.

Consumers and businesses are spending money. That money is revenue for corporations. After subtracting costs from those sales you get profits. Those profits are higher now in part because margins are higher:


It really is that simple.

Earnings growth doesn’t guarantee high stock market returns. Earnings growth was high during the 1940s (+9.9%) and 1970s (+9.9%) but so was inflation and there were extrernal factors that caused returns to be muted in those decades.

Earnings growth wasn’t all that strong in the 1920s (+5.6%), 1950s (+3.9%) or 1980s (+4.4%) but annual returns were lights out in each of those decades.

So these relationships aren’t written in stone.

However, you can see that the lost decades of the 1930s and 2000s both had terrible earnings growth of -5.6% and +0.8%, respectively.

If you want to know why stocks are up over the past decade and a half, look no further than earnings growth.

It won’t last forever because nothing does but this bull market has been carried by strong company fundamentals.

1It should also be noted that one of the reasons dividend yields are lower now than they were in the past is because buybacks (essentially the same thing as dividends in a different form) are more prevalent today. Share repurchases also increase earnings per share by reducing the number of shares on the open market."

MY COMMENT

AMAZING returns for a long 15 year time span. In fat I would go as far as to call it a 15 year....BULL MARKET. Think of ALL the short term "stuff" that impacted the shorter term markets over that time and were freak-out events for many investors.

The POWER of LONG TERM INVESTING. Also the POWER of fundamentals and earnings....as the ONLY.....real indicator and driver of market health and company success.

EVERYTHING else is simply NOISE.

 

AND.....speaking of NOISE.....the government shut-down. The impact will basically be.....NOTHING. Why? Because government does not contribute anything to the economy....it is a drag on the economy. It takes money out of the hands of people and business in the form of taxes and fees and often.....irrationally....spends and uses that money. It is often UNPRODUCTIVE and WASTED money. It is not spent or used based on market forces....it is simply too often used to further political purposes or reward political friends.

I dont think this one will last very long...perhaps 2-4 weeks at best.

BUT.....the media is in hog heaven.....they now have a daily fear-mongering topic that they can push, push, push.

A government shutdown begins after talks break down

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-government-shutdown-begins-after-talks-break-down-040124607.html

 

I dont know why anyone would think this is a surprise....it is right in line with all the recent data showing a soft labor market.

ADP report: Private employers unexpectedly shed 32,000 jobs as labor market continues pullback
The data adds to mounting signs of trouble in the job market.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/adp-...abor-market-continues-pullback-123714355.html

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"US private employers shed 32,000 jobs in September, the latest sign that the labor market is in a serious pullback.

The data out Wednesday from payroll processor ADP was far below economists’ expectations of 51,000 jobs added. Private payrolls for August were also revised sharply lower to a loss of 3,000, after data initially showed a gain of 54,000.

“Despite the strong economic growth we saw in the second quarter, this month's release further validates what we've been seeing in the labor market, that US employers have been cautious with hiring,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said in a statement.

The drop in private payrolls was led by small- and medium-size businesses, though companies employing over 500 people actually added 33,000 positions in September, ADP said. By sector, service-providing companies — including leisure and hospitality as well as business services — suffered in particular, seeing a decline of 28,000 positions.

Pay gains for workers who changed jobs in September slid to 6.6% from 7.1% a month earlier. Annual pay growth for job-stayers remained steady.

With the US jobs report for September likely to be delayed due to the government shutdown, private payroll data is in greater focus among economists and market watchers.

Recent government data releases have suggested a job market in stasis. The pace of new positions being added to the economy has slowed dramatically, with the country even losing 13,000 positions in June for the first time since 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. ADP data for that month also showed a drop in payrolls among private employers, though by a larger number: 23,000.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, hit 4.3% in August, its highest level since October 2021. And, while the number of available positions increased slightly that month, according to data released by the government on Tuesday, the hiring rate and level of workers quitting their jobs declined as Americans clung to their positions and employers remained hesitant to add staff in an economy defined by uncertainty."

MY COMMENT

As usual.....THE EXPERTS......the economists....were totally WRONG. HERE is what they "expected":

"The data out Wednesday from payroll processor ADP was far below economists’ expectations of 51,000 jobs added. Private payrolls for August were also revised sharply lower to a loss of 3,000, after data initially showed a gain of 54,000."

MASSIVELY and TOTALLY wrong on their expectation and totally wrong on the August data that was originally reported as a gain of 54,000 jobs which turned into an ACTUAL loss of 3000 jobs. How in the world can these people.....the so called experts....be so wrong ALL THE TIME.

DUH.....we are in for a long era of slow and steady job losses...... caused by AI and outsourcing. Of course for business this is probably a good thing......lower employee costs (less employees) and higher employee productivity. And for workers.....the data above STILL shows good and steady wage increases and levels.

At the same time we are seeing a nice booming economy with great GDP numbers and consumer activity. The new normal? Perhaps.

PLUS.....a WAKE UP CALL.....for the idiots on the FED.

 

I guess the markets are now starting to give their view of the shut-down. The DOW and the NASDAQ have now turned green. that did not take long.

PUS....the SP500 is right on the knife edge of turning green right now.

The losses in the big averages have now gone away.....as they all sit either basically unchanged or green.

 

MORE good news today......I actually consider the labor data as good news....as an investor.

10-year Treasury yield falls after surprise decline in private payrolls, government shutdown

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/01/us-treasury-yields-us-government-shuts-down-.html

 

I have not looked at my account yet...but looking at how my eight stocks are now doing and the four that are currently green....I am sure I have a nice gain at this moment.

What if they did a government shut-down and no one cared? I think that is where we are at....NO ONE CARES. Once the politicians see REALITY.....that no one cares and there is nothing to be gained politically.....it will end.....and we will move on. It will all be a quickly forgotten short term event that.....regardless of the frenzy of media fear-mongering....was irrelevant.

 

Ok.....lets see how the day settles in over the next hours. We are starting fresh right now with all the big averages basically....FLAT.

Another day of NOTHING really going on of relevance to stocks or funds....as we wait for earnings later in October...what really counts.

I am thinking this is going to end up as a....."small cap"......show me the money....day.

 

Looks like NKE "might" have turned a corner. I have high hopes for the new management. I certainly like what I am seeing and what is outlined in this little article.

BUT....the old management so wore me out with their focus on BS outside their core business and with their FAILED strategy to ditch "retail" outlets.....I am not anywhere near trying this stock again.

Perhaps a small position after I see another quarter of earnings and progress. They certainly are the type of dominant, big cap, iconic, company that I like....once they are back on track and managing their business properly rather than squandering it.....to the social media and cultural gods.

Nike stock rises 5% as earnings, sales top forecasts, company continues progress with turnaround

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nike...inues-progress-with-turnaround-165504471.html

The last time the stock was booming was about September of 2021...at a price of $163.29 per share. Over the past five years it is RED. A real UGLY picture.

 

A really nice day today....the DOW and the SP500 hit new all time highs.....as did my account.

I had six of eight stocks green today.....the lagers COST and HD.....the non-tech world. I had a nice size, small, gain today. BUT...I was beat by the SP500 by...0.10%. I faded a bit heading into the close.

The SP500 closed above 6700 for the first time at.....6711. We are quickly approaching my year end target of 6800 to 6900....way before year end.

 

The basic reason for long term investing......the power of compounding.

How compound interest can help you retire a millionaire — even on a modest income
Contrary to a common assumption, you don't need a lot of money. You need a lot of time, and you need to use it as wisely as possible.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone.../01/compounding-gains-retirement/86039892007/

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"Does it seem like your monthly bills have grown a far more than your monthly income has over the course of the past few years? If so, you're not alone. Although wages have statistically kept up with the cost of living of late, most people say it certainly doesn't feel that way. There's often so little money left over these days that saving anything for retirement seems a bit pointless.

Don't slip into that mindset! As little as you might be able to put toward your retirement now and for the foreseeable future, every little bit you can tuck away here helps more than you might realize. You will eventually reach a point where it all clearly becomes worth it. It's just that this point is much further down the road than it seems like it should be.

The good news is, after you reach this point, the growth fireworks really start. Here's the proof.

Some encouraging number-crunching

No matter how brilliant a stock-picker you might be, the fact is, time does most of the work for any long-term investor. The more of it you give yourself, the exponentially better off you are. For perspective, assuming you match the S&P 500's average annual net gain of 10% (with dividend reinvestment), a $1 investment made today in 10 years would be worth $2.59, but would be worth $6.73 in 20 years' time. And in 30 years, that $1 investment would have grown to $17.45.

This seems a bit counterintuitive, but the numbers are correct. How does your money grow so much faster later on than it does earlier? That's the power of compounding. The more money you make every year, the more money you've got working for you the following year. Eventually, this growth seems to take on a little more life of its own.

But what might this look like in more practical terms for you?

Let's again make the same assumption that you'll more or less match the S&P 500's average yearly gain of 10%. Only this time, let's also say you're going to come up with a doable modest sum of $500 per month to put toward your retirement savings, or $6,000 per year. As the graphic below illustrates, by the end of the 10th year you're sitting on about $105,000, although $60,000 of that is your deposited savings. Ugh. By the end of the 20th year though, only $120,000 of your total account balance of $378,000 reflects your contributions. After 30 years, you're sitting on nearly $1.1 million, only $180,000 of which is your sum-total deposits. The other $906,000 reflects the net growth your $180,000 worth of contributions generated over this stretch of time.



Again, that's the power of compounding, or achieving more and more gains due to the ever-growing amount of money you've got working for you.

Your mindset is everything

There are some important footnotes to add here, one of which is the fact that this projection — while mathematically correct — doesn't factor in taxes. If you're saving for retirement in a Roth IRA this won't really matter. If your nest egg is in an ordinary IRA though, it's almost sure to be taxed as it's withdrawn.

Also bear in mind that, due to inflation, in 30 years' time this $1.1 million won't be the relatively meaningful amount of money it is today. Assuming average annual inflation of 2.5%, 30 years from now $1.1 million would actually only be worth about half that amount in today's dollars.

Of course, your income and the amount of money you can save for retirement should also grow proportionally with inflation, if not more so. So, don't worry too much about this particular headwind.

More than anything though, notice how long it took until the annual gains on your total investments began exceeding your annual $6,000 contribution. That wasn't until the eighth year in, and even then only barely. Then note when most of your net growth actually materialized here. Two-thirds of your total net gains of $906,000 were made in just the last nine years of this 30-year stretch.

The thing is, you had to reach that 22nd year with as much retirement savings as you possibly could. Even if it didn't seem like much at the time, there's an important multiplier effect already working in your favor by then. It's just not easy to see at the time.

The point is, don't get so discouraged that you end up saving nothing. Everyone who retires a self-made millionaire from nothing but their investments starts off this way: very slowly. They mostly became millionaires because they continued to save and invest (even if only nickels and dimes) even when it wasn't easy to do so. You can bet they were pretty discouraged at times, too. But, they entered the so-called "boom times" with enough retirement savings already in tow to make the most of them. You should aim to do the same, even if it doesn't feel like there's any point. There is."

MY COMMENT

Anyone can do this with any amount of money. The key is time....start young. Trust the process and the long term projections. Ignore the doubters.

YOU can do it....start today....join us on the path to family financial security.

 

I am not in the prediction business. investing is not based on predicting or somehow trading various events and market conditions. It is based on long term rational and realistic....PROBABILITY.

Myopia in the Zeitgeist
Thoughts on headlines’ fascination with Q4 returns.

https://www.fisherinvestments.com/en-us/insights/market-commentary/myopia-in-the-zeitgeist

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"Too far, too fast, is a pretty common phrase after stocks enjoy a nice run, so we aren’t surprised to see it everywhere this week, as Q3 winds down. Sometimes it is a statement, others, a question. But we were a little perplexed by a Wall Street Journal linkwrap on this general theme, whose headline asked: “Are there any stock-market gains left for the fourth quarter?” Then we did some Internet sleuthing to see if this topic had legs, and we found a slew of headlines arguing for—and others against—a strong Q4. Look, friends, we are bullish, but we also don’t think anyone can have the faintest clue what stocks will do over any three-month stretch. Thinking so short-term is a fool’s errand.

For one, stocks don’t have some fixed ceiling for full-year gains. If you look at any record of historical annual returns, you will see they are all over the map. The MSCI World Index’s full-year returns start with 1970. Those range from an excruciating -40.7% drop (2008) to a joyous 41.9% boom (1986).[ii] Of the 55 full years in the books thus far, 22 of them topped the index’s year-to-date return through Monday’s close, 16.9%.[iii] That would suggest there is not some magical allotment the market has used up. The annual return grinch is not about to pluck away untapped potential. This bull market, like all bull markets, will run on until it reaches its natural euphoric end or something huge, unseen and ugly wallops it sooner. We don’t see such a wallop looming, but should it strike, the calendar and preceding year-to-date gains will be irrelevant.

Yet this doesn’t dictate that stocks will rise in Q4, for a simple reason: Short-term volatility is always possible, for any or no reason. That entails the risk of sudden pullbacks and sentiment-induced corrections—those sharp, painful drops of -10% to -20%. We endured one this spring, with the worst coming in Liberation Day’s aftermath. That doesn’t render another this year impossible. Twin corrections have struck before, including in 2011 and 2018. And, again, they can happen at any time, for any or no reason. Hence, they are impossible to predict.

Heck, all short-term moves are impossible to foresee. Anyone who does got lucky and probably didn’t do it repeatedly. Sentiment—feelings—is just too big a factor affecting returns from day to day and week to week. Feelings are fickle. Sometimes a big scare story hits the market alongside headlines. Sometimes the market sees the headlines and yawns. Sometimes traders do short-term trader things and the market has a big move and no one cares. And sometimes it sparks panic and you get a few more bad days. A bad economic report that hit sentiment in January might be a non-event in November. You just don’t know.

Ben Graham, legendary investor and godfather of security analysis, once observed that in the short term, the stock market is a voting machine. A register of feelings! Only in the longer term is it a weighing machine, considering carefully how reality is likely to unfold relative to expectations. Another way to say this is that as time marches on and we look back at returns, we see all those short-term wobbles netted out into a general trend up, down or very occasionally sideways. That trend is the weighing. The voting is that noise you see when you zoom in.

A three-month stretch will always be noise in this grand scheme of things. Focusing there is myopic. We can—and do—observe that there is a lot of myopia in the zeitgeist right now, which tells us some skepticism lingers in the marketplace even as sentiment warms. Universally optimistic investors tend to focus on the long term en masse. Skepticism, however faint, is what prompts questions like, will we get another good quarter before the party ends? Does this year have any more gas left in the tank? Can the AI boomlet run maybe a smidge longer?

So we are encouraged by the same headlines that befuddle us. They show there is still some wall of worry for this bull market to climb. Do yourself a favor: Focus on that and let others worry about what happens in Q4."

MY COMMENT

YES.....the bull market is alive and well. What else can I say...it is what it is.

 

The big averages showed all green at the open today....but looking at my stocks I was not seeing it. So....I have been ignoring the markets so far to let them settle and get the opening trades out of the way.

Right now much of the early gains are gone.....but there is no clear direction....the DOW is red....the SP500 is flat.....and the NASDAQ is green. Where we go from here.....who knows.

 

Who would have known? Well just about anyone that watches the FAILURE of the experts to know much over the past 5-10 years. MORONS.

THE ECONOMIC CONSENSUS HAS BEEN WRONG ALL YEAR
We in the Economics Profession Need to Look Ourselves in the Mirror

https://www.apolloacademy.com/we-in-the-economics-profession-need-to-look-ourselves-in-the-mirror/

 

You have to acknowledge success and fact.....so here you go. This person is the most ICONIC business visionary of our times.

Musk becomes first person to hit $500 billion net worth, Forbes list shows

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-becomes-first-person-hit-222331321.html