S&P has a sudden drop! Is it time to panic?
As of November 15th, 2025, there seems to be a lot of stock market doomsday predictions in the news cycle again. For many people, headlines like these can cause fear, indecision, or even worse, a decision to sell when the best decision is to sit tight and do nothing.
Here are a few links to recent posts:
While headlines like these can cause emotions and feelings to run high, let’s dig a little deeper and try to see what smart money does is doing in today’s environment.
The first thing to ask yourself and evaluate is, do you need any of your investment money in the next 3 - 5 years? If the answer is yes, rebalancing today, and making sure your investments have sufficient fixed assets is wise. If the answer is no, then let’s keep digging.
In relation to recent negative headlines, one of the first things to understand is that many money managers are being judged on whether or not they have beat the S&P 500 for the year and December 31st is creeping up quickly! With the S&P 500 on it’s 3rd year of strong returns, many managers are finding themselves in jeopardy of being fired, as they incorrectly anticipated a market pullback (which never came), and parked client’s money on the sidelines while the broader market ran up. For those money managers, they have 2 options with just 45 days left in the year. Try to artificially influence the news with doomsday scenarios, hoping the market will take a big crash, so they can say “see, we didn’t lose as much money as everyone else”, OR they can sink some of the money sitting in cash into riskier assets and try to go for bigger gains to close out the year. These two scenarios are realities that professional money managers are navigating today. Fortunately, individual investors don’t have those worries, and have no pressure to participate in the chaos because there is no year end deadline to meet.
There is a very real possibility that we can see a pullback in the market of 5 - 10% before the end of the year. In fact, personally, I am expecting that to be a probability. I also don’t anticipate the pullback to last very long. Here are a few indicators that suggest any short term pain that the stock market will experience, will quickly yield way to more gains in 2026.
Elon Musk recently purchased $1 Billion in Tesla stock while it was at its highest point in almost a year. This signaled a very optimistic point of view for the future of the company.
Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway recently purchased approximately $4.5 Billion of Google stock. Berkshire Hathaway has a reputation of investing when they see a lot of upside and have done a lot of homework. Berkshire Hathaway has been sitting on billions of dollars in cash for almost 2 years now, waiting for an investing opportunity. The fact that Warren Buffett is investing now, is extremely optimistic.
The U.S. unemployment rate has remained virtually unchanged since April of 2024, signaling a vibrant economy in the U.S.
To answer the question, is it time to panic? My belief is that the answer is no, it is not time to panic. Continue to dollar cost average into your favorite investments and if you have the ability, put aside some cash to ‘buy the dip’ toward the end of December. Money managers typically rebalance around that time and many popular stocks fall for no other reason, other than stocks are being bought and sold to prepare for the incoming year.
Stay Invested!!
