Hello, my name is Chad Taylor, managing partner with MDT Financial Advisors here in Houston, Texas. Today is Wednesday, February the 12th, 2025, and I wanted to get on and do a quick video on some of the things that we're seeing and doing our markets minute videos. Now, before I get into the markets minute information, I wanted to remind you it is tax time and tax documents are in the process of coming out if they haven't already come out. So you should be able to see those. If for some reason you can't find it, you need a copy, don't hesitate to reach out to us and let us know. We can print it here locally and send it to you. In addition, if you need us to send it to your tax preparer, we can help with that as well, if that makes it easier. So don't hesitate to reach out and let us know.

So I was reading our weekly market commentary from the Wells Fargo Investment Institute and they were talking about the Super Bowl. So I don't know if everybody got to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday. I watched most of it. I kind of gave up after it looked like it was out of hand, but it does kind of bring to a question here as far as the markets go. So if you remember, the chiefs were going for a threepeat, I don't think it's happened in the NFL before. And were, and the institute was using that and talking about the s and p 500. And so the last two years, if you remember, the s and p 500 has been up over 20% a year. Now I know in our last couple of videos that we talked about, if you remember, it was a fairly narrow, fairly narrow market where if you remember, the magnificent seven stocks accounted for a big portion of the gains.

And when you looked at the s and p 500 and spread it out evenly across the 500 stocks, that told a different picture. But the s and p 500 that you hear about in the news has been up 20% the last two years. And so the question was, has it happened before where the s and p 500 was up 20% for three years in a row? And the answer is yes. And I remember this, it was in the late nineties where it did happen, where the s and p 500 was up 20% three years in a row. And that was, I guess, probably the only time that it's happened since they've been keeping track of things like that with the indexes. And so does that mean, what does that mean for us this year? We don't think that the s and p will return quite that good this year.

That's not our projections. And when I say us, I mean our research from Wells Fargo Investment Institute, but they do think the market will be higher at the end of the year than it was at the beginning of the year. And the last time that they brought up their projections, it was to the tune of 10 to 15% that they thought it would be, or 10 to 12% that they thought it would be higher year over year. We'll see if that happens. Everybody. It's hard to gauge markets, and I know we've talked about this a number of times that if you need the money in the next year, the next two years, the next three years, having it in the markets may not be the right thing for you. But if you are invested, we always try to remind people we're looking at longer term than just one year.

And if you do have a longer time horizon, usually that makes investing a little bit easier, although it's always tough, but trying to predict one year to the next is difficult. But it is something that always happens at the beginning of the year, and that's what we're saying right now. So there's some good things out there why we think the economy will continue to grow. But there's some things that are concerning too. You can look at the tariff stuff that we had a few weeks ago, if you remember that we left on Friday, they implemented some tariffs over the weekend and then backed 'em off on Monday and the markets reacted to that.

But you look at today, in fact, the inflation numbers came in a little hotter or higher than expected. And so the market's reacting to that. But unemployment is still low, historically low. I mean at the end of 2025, we're projecting it to still be at 4.8, which is lower than the average of 5.7 going back to 1948. And so there are some good things out there. There are some things that do give you pause, but as always with markets, it is the things you don't see that you worry about that happened. And so that's why diversity is still in our experience, still the best thing, having a longer time horizon. If you need the money sooner, maybe not have it in the markets. And so this is the first video that I've done this year. I want it to be quick. We'll start adding to this if you have questions about this or anything else or if you would like a copy of the weekly commentary report where I got some of this information from, just let us know. But as always, I appreciate it. I hope you have a great day. Thank you.