Googins Advisors Inc.
March 2025 Newsletter
March 14, 2025
Dear Friends and Clients:
Stress, worry, emotions may be ruling your life. We have been surprised at the number of people panicking. Why? Panic is not an intellectual decision; it has no purpose other than to disrupt your life and waste your time. As the Capital Group, American Funds, say: Investors are spinning from one news cycle to the next.
Good rules the world. Good produces truth and truth survives. Lack of truth produces evil. Evil fights on with lies and eventually dies. If you know something is true, it cannot change but the fight for truth to be recognized may take a long time.
Facts: Brian Wesbury, economist, thinks the market is expensive…maybe overvalued. We believe he is an excellent source of information and not recommending leaving the market, simply understanding stocks can be expensive compared to historical values in a certain way. In the meantime stocks can pay dividends and capital gains. “However,” as the saying goes, “it is a market of stocks and not a stock market. Just because some models say the market as a whole is over-valued does not mean all stocks are over-valued. Because the S&P is top heavy, with just 10 stocks making up over 1/3rd of its total capitalization, it is hard for the other 490 stocks to offset declines in these very large cap companies.” Wesbury, 3-10-25
What is good for the long term makes the short term look worse. Debt is horrible and dangerous. Googins Advisors has always talked about being debt free or reducing debt. Now we are actually listening to some politicians discuss paying off government debt and not allowing long term deficits. We should be distressed that is not our current position! If you live without debt, or controlled debt, you know the comfort of that position.
A few more items; are we in a recession or is one coming? Of course there will be recessions – times when business slows down. I have never been able to worry about recessions, they are normal. As Nick Murray says, “The great companies will work around the problem.” If something is too expensive; don’t buy it. That may be easy to say when one’s income is good or high but it has been my philosophy forever – I think it is yours also.
Our goal is to give you good, honest facts amid difficult times. Nick Murray reminds us that “in this still young century, the broad equity market essentially halved in the implosion of the dot-com bubble, Enron disaster and the accounting scandals. (1998-2001) It halved again in a Global Financial Crisis, during which the world’s credit system at one point ceased to function altogether (2007-2009). The market declined by a third in barely a month when a deadly hundred-year plague enveloped the world in 2020. It went down 25% in ten months during 2022 when hyperinflation briefly threatened and the Fed engineered the fastest, steepest rate hike in its history.”
“Yet a $10,000 investment in the S&P500 at year-end 1999 – right before the bubble popped – and left to compound had grown to over $66,000 at the end of 2024. At no time during any of these very real crises could your advisor – or anyone else – have told you when and how the situation would be resolved, much less when and where the market would bottom. It was the wrong question, and it’s the wrong question now.” Nick Murray, March 2025
Please, continue to call our offices with all your questions.
Sincerely yours,
Louise Googins, President
Richard Martin, Investment Advisor
Michael Googins, Administrator
Kim Rankin, Accountant
Lynne Goldsmith, Investment Advisor
Dayton Hoffmann, Investment Advisor
Katie Gunderman, Intern