Wrapping Up the Year: Our Final Stock Club Meeting

We closed out the year with our final Stock Club meeting in November - and it was a fitting capstone to a strong, disciplined, and ultimately very successful year.

As with any active investing strategy, not every position ends as a winner. During this meeting, we reviewed two commodity positions that hit their stop losses and were exited accordingly. While stopping out is never anyone’s favorite outcome, it’s also not atypical—especially in commodities, where volatility is part of the game. More importantly, those exits were executed exactly as planned, reinforcing the importance of process over emotion.

And the process worked.

We finished the year with a 25.41% return, comfortably outperforming the S&P 500, which came in just under 18%. That level of outperformance isn’t an accident—it’s the result of patience, risk management, and sticking to our rules even when the market tests our conviction.

After reviewing performance, we shifted gears and spent the remainder of the meeting evaluating our current holdings through a slightly different lens. Each position was categorized as either a “Forever Stock” or “Not.”

A Forever Stock is exactly what it sounds like: a business we believe is so fundamentally strong that we intend to hold it indefinitely. These are companies with durable competitive advantages, strong balance sheets, and leadership positions that we expect to endure across market cycles.

Everything else falls into the Not category. These positions still have upside potential, but they come with defined risk parameters. If a stop loss is triggered, we sell. This distinction helps keep our strategy clear and our emotions in check.

Ending the year with this exercise was a great reminder of who we are as investors. We’re long-term thinkers, but we’re also disciplined managers of risk.

Those two ideas can—and should—coexist.

With the books now closed on a fantastic year, our attention turns forward.

Next up: our Annual Meeting in January, where we’ll celebrate the year by indulging in red meat and dark liquor!