My dear child:
Ten thousand dollars, put into an ordinary index fund at the start of 1980 and never touched, is worth about a million and a half today.
Never touched. That was the entire discipline. Forty-six years, dividends reinvested, nothing clever.
Now the part nobody puts on the poster. Along the way that money fell by a third in a single autumn. Twice it lost roughly half its value. Whoever owned it sat through Black Monday, the dot-com years, 2008, and a pandemic, and every one of those storms looked permanent from the inside. That's what a storm does. It fills the whole sky and makes you think that this time is different.
So people sold. Careful, smart people, and they sold for the most human reason there is: to feel safe. Selling does feel like taking shelter. But it signs you up for a second decision nobody gets right, which is when to walk back out. The sky doesn't announce that it's clearing. I went back and checked the weekly numbers: eighteen of the market's twenty best weeks since 1980 arrived while it was still falling or climbing out of a hole. The best weeks come while it's raining, packed in beside the worst ones, and the one indoors waiting for certainty misses them all.
The people who ended up with the million and a half weren't braver or smarter. They refused to make either decision.
You don't have to outsmart the market. You have to outsit it.
The next storm will come, probably sooner than you'd like. Decide now, in dry weather, which one you'll be. You won't think straight in the rain.
In forty-six years, every storm ended. Every ruin I ever saw belonged to a man who ran.
One thing I'd tell my younger self: The storm always looks permanent from the inside.
From the bookshelf: "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel. Half a century of evidence that nobody times the market, written before most of the people still trying were born.
A question to sit with: In the last crash, did you hold, or did you run? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
Yours sincerely,
