Rise Advisors Market Update November 2025

Transcript Below 

Hi everybody. This is Zach Harrington, partner and Chief Investment Officer at Rise Advisors. And I want to thank you for taking the time to watch our November market update. So, as we sit here getting into year end, I wanted to do things a little bit differently for the month of November. So instead of focusing on charts and economic data points, I wanted to oversimplify it a little bit. And so, some of you may be familiar with Pinterest quote boards and things like that, and I wanted to have a little bit of fun with the November update and share some famous quotes from, in my opinion, one of the greatest investors of all time. So, gentleman by the name of Peter Lynch, who, for those of you who aren't familiar for the better part of three decades, managed the Magellan Fund at Fidelity. And the Magellan Fund was arguably one of the greatest actively managed mutual funds of all time.

And Peter Lynch just had this natural way of oversimplifying investing to where most of us who came up in business schools or investing courses throughout the 90s, 2000s, and early aughts, Peter Lynch, was a staple. He, in my opinion, is one of the greatest stewards of people's money. And the lessons he has in these quotes, I think apply now more than they ever have. And so I wanna start off with this first quote, especially when you think about where things sit in the markets today. We're having conversations with clients all the time right now around tech bubbles and AI concerns and what's going on with the, you know, executive branch and tariffs and all of this stuff. But sometimes it's really important just to take a step back and remember the big picture and the fact that this is a marathon, not a sprint.

So, the first Peter Lynch quote I want to share with you, “far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections or anticipating corrections than has been lost in corrections themselves”. This, to me, is such an important piece where if you're living your whole life or your whole investment thesis is just simply based on the worry that markets might come down, you're going to miss out on the upside. Far more often than not, markets are up, then they are down and over a long enough period of time if you just stay convicted in what you own and your allocation, you're going to make money.

The next plays off of this a little bit. And Peter Lynch once said, “if you're smart enough to sell, you have to be even smarter to buy”. And what that implies is that when you're an investor and you're looking to get out of a mutual fund or ETF or a stock position itself, and you go to cash because you're worried about markets going down, you need to then be committed in what your reentry point is. And that's something most people struggle with. You have the fear that if you buy back into the market, it's gonna sell back off and it's really hard to time the bottom. So instead of trying to outsmart the market and be hyperly overactive, just remain invested, you're going to be better off far more often than you aren't.

The next one “the trick is not to learn to trust your gut feeling, but rather to discipline yourself to ignore them”. This is a testament in blocking out the noise. If you just look at the last five calendar years, so we're sitting here in November of 2025, we've had a global pandemic, we've had an economic shutdown, we've had a rate hiking environment that we've seen once or twice as significant of a rate hike as we did throughout 2022 and 2023. We've had Russia invade Ukraine, we've had concerns over China and Taiwan. We've had concerns over tech growth. We've had massive valuation expansions in the S&P 500. We've had concerns over elections, we've had tariff tantrums, we've had legality battles over whether the tariffs are an abuse of power or not. And in all of that, you would've missed one of the best five year bull markets we've seen. Sure, was there a couple of bear markets or corrections sprinkled in there? Absolutely. But your gut feeling of things could go bad, is probably right. But once again, you have to remain invested in order to recognize the long-term benefit. Just block out the noise and stay committed to your asset allocation.

That leads me to actually a Sun Tzu quote. I was listening to a lecture from Dr. Peter Attia on kind of aging and longevity, and it really kind of hit home to me in the world of financial planning and investment management. So, the quote is, “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”. And that to me is a testament to how we think things should be done at Rise Advisors. Focus on the planning side of it first, understand what your cash flow needs are, understand what your time horizons are, understand some of the strategy that you're trying to accomplish, both in the accumulation and decumulation phase. And once you have a sound strategy or financial plan, at that point, worry about the tactics. How much you are allocated to stocks or bonds is irrelevant if you don't know how it impacts the strategy of what you're trying to accomplish. And so, the best thing you could do during periods like this where there's noise, where every single day you want to get out of the market or you're worried the corrections coming or the bear market's coming, or the AI bubbles coming, control what you can control.

Have a really comprehensive financial plan that builds out the strategy that you need over the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years. And then let the market do what it needs to do because you have confidence in the tactics you've deployed based on the strategy. And with that, I wanna leave you with this clip right here. This is a 1993 interview that Peter Lynch did with C-Span where he talks about how the stock markets behave and the acceptance of volatility. Markets are going to go up, they're going to go down. And as he says in this clip that you're going to see momentarily in the 93 years he references, which are from 1900 to 1993, the market corrected itself 50 times, meaning it sold off greater than 10%. So every two years, the market's going to sell off somewhere around 10%. Now, that's been a little bit more frequently over the last five, but historically, every couple years it's going to correct itself.

15 of those 50 sell-offs of 10% ended up being greater than 25%. Those are a bear market. Those are going to exist. We all can name most of them. We're talking, you know, COVID shutdown, tariff tantrum, we're talking the rate hiking scare that took place in 2022, the COVID shutdown during March of 2020, so on and so forth. If you can accept those factors though, over those 93 years, you would've made a lot of money being invested in the stock market. And so, once again, focus on strategy, not on tactics. Commit to a financial plan, commit to an asset allocation, and let time be your best friend. That's our message here in November of 2025. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns about what's taking place in your portfolio, we're here to help. Please reach out to myself, Mark, Stephanie, Angelica, or Chuck, and we hope you have a wonderful holiday season. And thank you for watching our November market update. Thank you.

Excerpt from a 1993 Peter Lynch Interview with C-Span: “50 declines in 93 years. About once every two years the market falls 10%. Of those 50 declines, 15 have been 25% or more. That's known as a bear market. We've had 15 declines in 93 years. So every 6 years the market's going to have a 25% decline. That's all you need to know. You need to know the market's going to go down sometime. If you're not ready for that, you shouldn’t own stocks. And it's good when it happens. If you like a stock at 14, it goes to 6. That's great. If you understand the company, you look at the balance sheet and they're doing fine, and you're hoping to get to 22 with it, 14 to 22 is terrific. 6 to 22 is exceptional. So, you take advantage of these declines, they're going to happen. No one knows when they're gonna happen”.

This presentation is for Informational purposes only.

All investment strategies including rebalancing and diversified asset allocation have risk. Past performance of our investment approach, component holdings and methods does not guarantee future results. Advisory services offered through Rise Advisors, LLC ("Rise") Registered Investment Advisor. While all data is believed to be from reliable sources, accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed.