Photo Credit: Johnny Milano for The New York Times.
I was struggling with a theme for this quarter’s letter until I saw this picture on October 15th. The tall pilings of a house on 36th Street in Mexico Beach, Fla., helped it survive Hurricane Michael relatively unscathed.
As many of you know I split my time between the mountains and the beach, and my beach is in the Panhandle area of Florida, just 76 miles from this devasting scene.
When I left the mountains, Hurricane Michael was a “disturbance” off the Yucatan peninsula. In just 4 days the “disturbance” was upgraded to hurricane Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 & finally Level 4 headed straight for my beach gathering steam from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Fortunately, we were already scheduled to stay with family a day’s drive away, so we had shelter from the storm as we watched it gather momentum & veer to the east making landfall at Mexico Beach just shy of Category 5 with winds of 155 mph.
What does my story & this picture tell us about financial planning, investment markets, and life? Strong relationships, like tall & deep pilings and sturdy storm-tested foundations, help us weather the inevitable storms. That is what we strive to provide to you our clients as we weather the storms of life and the investment markets together and give back to those less fortunate with our time, talent and treasure.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, and investments carry the risk of loss, including the risk of loss of invested capital.