Q4 2024 Newsletter from Curry Webb

Greetings from Curry Webb Wealth Management!

Happy New Year! We hope that all is well with you and your family as we start 2025. As we look back to the 4th Quarter of 2024, it was an outstanding year.

Face-to-face interactions with clients are the best part of what we do. In November, we experienced one of the high marks of our year when we traveled as a team to visit our Houston clients. The trip was so much fun! It was great seeing everyone who was able to come out to meet on a more social basis. In fact, we plan on having more events, both local and remote. Be sure to watch your email for announcements.

Do you know what “smishing” is? Essentially, it is a form of SMS phishing where scammers use text messages to trick people into sharing sensitive information. We’re mentioning it here because some of us have experienced such attempts recently. Note that Charles Schwab will never text you from a foreign number. If you receive a text message that appears to be from Schwab that you are not expecting, especially from a foreign number, do not respond to it and let us know. Account security is a top priority for us.

We frequently receive questions about how to write checks for depositing funds into Charles Schwab accounts. Checks should always be made out to “Charles Schwab.” We also suggest that you put the relevant account number on the memo line.

Portfolio and Market Commentary

Q4 performance reports are now in your eMoney vault.

Capped by the completed presidential election and assisted by two .25-point reductions in the Fed Funds Rate, it was a slightly positive quarter. The S&P 500 Composite inched up 2.41% while its equal-weighted counterpart declined by -1.87%. Growth was a bright spot again with the S&P 500 Growth index advancing 6.17%. Not so bright was international, with the MSCI EAFE Growth index down -9.07% and Dow Jones Total Market US Real Estate down -7.79%. Even with the two Fed Fund rate cuts, the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index declined by -3.06%.

The year was still very positive, with the S&P 500 Composite up 25.02% and the Equal Weighted S&P 500 up 13.01%. Why the big difference? Well, the “Magnificent Seven” now accounts for roughly one-third of the S&P 500 Index and were up over 63% on average for the year*.

Our investment methodology doesn’t require us to prognosticate macroeconomic factors, even though you might catch us doing it from time to time. Instead, our goal is to build portfolios with investments that, from a bottom-up perspective, have a high likelihood of achieving their goal over the long term.

With the 2024 presidential election now behind us and with a very recent uptick in the CPI, the argument for continued rate cuts in the current quarter becomes weaker. Still, this is just a short-term factor and does not change our bullish, but slightly tempered outlook for the upcoming year.

^{*Source: Yahoo Finance https://finance.yahoo.com/news/magnificent-seven-stocks-dominate-p-180221332.html}

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