What Market Volatility in 2026 Means for Investors

Transcript:

[00:00:09.27] 
Hi friends, Shane Tenny here, Managing Partner at Spaugh Dameron Tenny, coming to you at about the first trimester of 2026. As we near the end of April, we're past tax season, and it's been an interesting start to the year with news headlines, with market volatility, and I just wanted to take a minute and touch on this. You know, we started out the year with a pretty nice January. Then we had the news of the Iran war. And in many ways, investors over the last couple years have kind of gotten pretty tolerant of sensational headlines.

[00:00:39.18] 
But the price of oil and the cost of filling up your gas tank, um, did create fear in the month, the month of March, about just the economy, where things were headed, inflation. And we saw a drop in the price of stocks, as represented by the S&P 500. And so what does all this mean and where does this go? I want to share with you one chart, real quickly that we call the January Barometer.

[00:01:04.03] 
And the January Barometer is a way of looking at the historical returns of the S&P 500 based on how it performs in January. I want to be real clear - Everybody knows this is not a prediction of what's going to happen this year. This is just an illustration of what has occurred in the past. And so, as you can see in the chart, in the years when January was had positive returns, which we did in, in this calendar year, the, the S&P 500 has closed the year up over 16%.

[00:01:41.29] 
In years when January is negative or that barometer is negative, January closed negative, the S&P 500 seems to struggle again. Historically, not always. This is not a prediction. But what we have seen is this year we started January and ended positive, bumped around a little bit. The Iran war broke out.

[00:02:01.09] 
We saw a difficult March. For equity prices. And since then, we've seen a rebound with the S&P 500 through April 15th, up a little over 2%. So where does this get us? I don't know.

[00:02:15.26] 
Again, this is not a forecast of what's going to happen. This is just putting some context around what has historically happened, based on the January barometer. I will say in a future video, I'm going to talk a little bit about the historical returns in mid-year or midterm election cycles. And just to foreshadow a little bit, January— generally in mid-year election cycles, we see the S&P kind of flounder around through the first 3 quarters of the year. And then once polling becomes more consistent or we get results in November, there's a lot more stability, predictability, and we see a strong rebound in equity prices and the value of the stock market.

[00:02:57.16] 
So again, I'll show that to you next time, but just to give you an idea of some context. Hopefully, this is helpful, and we'll see you back here next time.