November Newsletter

WITH THE IMPENDING RETIREMENT OF WARREN BUFFET as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, the most recognized and respected CEO in American business may be Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. When he talks, people listen—and deservedly so.

Mr. Dimon was all but universally quoted in literally dozens of media outlets recently when he said:

“There continues to be a heightened degree of uncertainty stemming from complex geopolitical conditions, tariffs and trade uncertainty, elevated asset prices and the risk of sticky inflation.”

Nowhere did I see any report of what he said next. (That doesn’t mean it wasn’t printed anywhere; it just means that if it was, I didn’t see it. And believe me: I looked.) As it generally does, financial journalism tended to highlight the negative and even scary parts of a longer, more balanced and more proactive statement.

In fact, Mr. Dimon’s statement went on to report on the many steps his company is taking to shore up its capital against the threats enumerated above. He specifically mentioned significantly increased reserves for possible loan losses. And he generally painted a picture of an institution forewarned, forearmed and prepared for a wide range of rising challenges.

It would only be human for any investor to read that relatively brief but extremely well reported part of Mr. Dimon’s statement and think, “These are huge systemic problems. Their solutions are nowhere in sight. Thus they represent a significant threat to the stock market. Perhaps we should convert our investments to cash until things settle down a bit.”

I would draw your attention, as gently as possible, to the fact that as serious investors working with our advisor on a soundly based long-term plan, we are not, in fact, investing in the economy at all. We’re not even investing

in “the stock market” as such. Rather, we are investors in companies. This is a critical distinction—perhaps the critical distinction.

Substantial profit-seeking companies such as those we may own for the long term are, by and large, managed by executive teams and overseen by boards of directors committed to preserving the shareholders’ capital and acting opportunistically in crisis. Just as Mr. Dimon and his team are preparing for significant possible adversity, so we may assume are the managements of the other notably successful companies in which we’re invested.

Granted, nothing the managements do can ever immunize their stocks from significant declines when a real crisis hits. Indeed, the Standard & Poor’s 500-Stock

We’re not even investing in “the stock market” as such. Rather, we are investors in companies.

Index has since 1950 temporarily declined by an average of nearly a third on an average of every five years—battered by genuine crises that have taxed the financial and human resources of even the finest companies.

Just in the first 25 years of this century, the S&P 500 halved twice in a ten-year period (2000–02 and 2007–09) in the dot-com implosion and the Global Financial Crisis, respectively. It went down by a third in one month when COVID struck, and by 25% over ten months when inflation roared to nine percent and the Fed raised interest rates further and faster than ever in its history. And those were just the big ones: I won’t bore you with the three (yes, three) more occasions when the market—in widespread panic—went down plus or minus 20%. (Hint: the

third of these was in the tariff typhoon of earlier this year.) Yet $100,000 invested in the S&P 500 just before the dot-com bubble popped, and left to compound (taxes paid from another source), had grown to well over $700,000 at the end of this September.

Neither that statistic nor anything else proves anything whatsoever about the future. But it suggests to me—and I’ll bet to your advisor—that the great companies have in the long run consistently triumphed over macroeconomic crises and market crashes of every description

And it’s the companies that we’re investing in.

© 2025 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Used by permission.