Most investment problems are overreach problems. We want something to happen and then overestimate the probability that it will. Or a marketing campaign for some investment product seems almost too good to be true, and it ends up, after you buy it — you'll kick yourself — but being too good to be true. You end up paying high fees for an underperforming "solution" that had a marketing budget to go find problems. Investors desperately want panaceas, silver bullets, and ways to outperform....

(the one we don't make) My annual rite —  to bastardize the legacy Wall Street ritual of forecasting how markets will perform the next year. Through January and into February, my firm sits down with each client family to map out the year ahead together, including an overview of their investments. We provide both short-term and long-term expectations for their portfolio. This is what we will tell clients to expect in 2026 (i.e. the short-term): Of course there are people who will think this is...

The best investment lesson from the year, 2025? The day, April 9th. The stock market reacted to tariff surprises in late-February-early-April. It was a hellish couple months, with the S&P 500 down nearly 20%. In a data set that's normally distributed, where outcomes cluster around an average (e.g. human heights, shoe sizes, ACT scores), by definition 68% of outcomes fall within one standard deviation ("one sigma" or "1 σ ") . So if the average height is 70 inches with a standard deviation of...