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Buffett quiet exits, so we're going to be the band that plays him off. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe. Today, I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors John Quast and Matt Frankel. Today, we're going to talk about Warren Buffett's farewell letter, I guess, for a lack of a better term.
As usual, it's the Thursday show, so we're going to do stocks on our radar. But first, we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that this is officially the end of this current government shutdown. Yesterday, today, we debated which one it was, but we'll just say it's today anyways. Before we really get into a discussion, I actually want to ask both of you guys a quick question.
What was the return of the S&P 500 during the shutdown? Just give me a number. I would guess up less than 1%.
Yeah, since John kind of took my answer, I'll say up 3%.
Well, let's split it right down the middle, because it was 2.08. Maybe one of you would consider the win with the Dow Jones was actually a 3.91 over the 42-day span. Now, I bring this up, and I don't want to sound tone deaf to everyone that had to go through some rough times over the past five weeks. But the market didn't really seem to care that much.
2% is technically, if we look at long-term historical averages, that's technically better than the historical average. Am I wrong that the market just didn't seem to care?
Yeah, Tyler, you bring up a great point. There were essential workers that had to continue to go into work, and they did so without a paycheck. They do get back pay, but they still had bills in the meantime. It did cause hardship for people, and we don't want to make light of that. But to your point about the market being up in spite of the headlines, you know what?
I'm glad it worked out that way. You would have thought from all of the talk and all the chatter leading up to the shutdown, during the shutdown, you would have thought that it would have made a big difference in the stock market. But looking at the results, it frankly didn't. Great investor Peter Lynch tells investors not to look at the macro, but rather to focus on the individual businesses.
I think that we're seeing Once again, there's a whole lot of noise out there, but very few of the headlines are actually of true significance for long-term investors. It's refreshing that something as big and as scary, supposedly, as the longest government shutdown in history actually had really little impact on the stock market.
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