Understanding Your December 2024 Statement
Happy 2025 y’all! This is my first official blog of the year, and I am starting to prefer the 1-minute video format (the Meridian Market Minute)! There will be one that accompanies this post. Nonetheless, I will write about a topic that has been on some of our clients’ minds recently: December 2024 statements!
Yes, December was in fact a pretty bad month despite very strong overall performance in 2024. Many of you might have been blissfully unaware due to all of the holiday activity. It’s easy to get used to statements that show account values increasing from month to month, but it is always a rude awakening to see values decrease. It begs the question, why am I doing this again? The answer is because historically over the long term, taking some level of risk with investing will reward you with higher returns than safer options. Compounding that issue is that many monthly statements can be hard to read and downright confusing.
We hold our clients’ assets with Charles Schwab, and while Meridian provides very nice (yes, I am biased) quarterly performance reports, Schwab provides monthly statements (like most custodians). I won’t go into exact performance calculation formulas, but we have found that much of the confusion comes from the Dividends and Interest line, and the Market Value Change line.

In December, unless you were particularly prescient or just lucky, you probably saw a negative number in the Market Value Change line. Again, no one likes to see that, but it is the reality of investing. What is important to take note of, however, is the Dividends and Interest line. This number needs to be added to the Market Value Change in order to get to the actual Total Value Change for a given month. In many of our clients’ portfolios, the funds that were owned paid dividends and capital gains at the end of the year, so while the negative Market Value Change wasn’t fully offset, the dividends and capital gains certainly helped soften the blow. So, with Charles Schwab statements (and likely many others), pay attention to the Total Value Change to see the full picture.
Much like the markets in December 2024, the temperature has also gone down significantly and has brought not-small amounts of snow. My personal position on snow is that I generally like it if I get to ski or sled on it, and it is pretty to look at. But it gets annoying after it hangs around for a while. We don’t have the best sledding hills at our house, but we were able to get creative with a four-wheeler and some strong rope!

Here’s to smooth sledding for the markets in 2025!