Well, at first blush, it looks as though Santa skipped the stock market last year. For whatever reason, he opted not to deliver his namesake rally to end 2015. I wonder why? Were we naughty? Hmm….

You may recall that during the 2015 correction, the first one (a 10+% decline in the major averages) since 2011, that I said that if I had my druthers, the market wouldn’t come bounding right back anytime soon; that it might be better if we log a down year in 2015. My thinking was that corrections are ultimately very good things because they “correct” stuff. In essence, they fix incorrect valuations, they punish excessive speculation, they pull some weeds if you will. And, alas, the weed-pulling didn’t get to last nearly long enough to clean up the landscape—the worst September in 4 years was followed by the best October in 4 years. So the market merely blinked, leaving things basically as is.

So I’m thinking Santa did us a bit of a favor by not spoiling us in 2015 with some big year-end rally. I’m thinking, while 2016 may indeed start out rough, that it has better odds of delivering coming off of a downer of a year versus following a year where stock prices once again expanded at a faster pace than did corporate earnings.

Here are a couple quick audios I produced during that rough September (the messages are timeless) designed to help you see through muck:

Painful Correction? Not for the Inisghtful Investor… September 30, 2015

The Timeless Wisdom of Hollywood Henderson… September 15, 2015