Daily Economic Update: March 12, 2025

Jolted

At one point I thought parts of the country were going to lose electricity and I didn’t even know we got electricity from Canada. Then I realized we were negotiating something..about electricity, or aluminium, or steel?  Honestly, I have no idea what's going on. But I’m willing to admit it. Most people aren’t.

While we were all distracted by the lights flickering, I almost forgot—

JOLTS Data dropped. That data showed that job openings rose by 232K, to 7.74mm in January.  Interestingly the federal government hiring rate increased by a 1/10th in that period. 

Speaking of data..Remember that whiff…

Will the inflation report today stink? Setting aside the fact that the YoY rate will continue to have a core CPI rate with a 3 handle (remember the target is 2%), everyone’s watching internals. Car prices, car insurance (wildfires and maybe a hint of the “t” word), and housing—always housing

As important as CPI reports tend to be, I don’t know if the data will matter that much as markets are focused on the impact of potential trade wars on both inflation and growth going forward.

Speaking of wars…maybe not everything stinks:

Reports are that Ukraine has agreed to terms outlined by the U.S. for a 30-day ceasefire. Now it’s up to Russia. Sounds like minerals are on the table. That should be a positive development.

The Early 2000’s Called… And They Want Their Narratives Back

Equities did rebound off the lows of the day,which saw the S&P touch a correction (down 10%) on that news… But the S&P still closed down 0.7% at 5,572.

But let’s zoom out:

Remember a world of massive uncertainty? Post-9/11. Dot-com bubble burst. Enron. India-Pakistan military standoff (no one remembers this). AIDS fears. Geopolitics.

And the digital revolution accelerating under it all.

Despite all that, if you zoom out… things worked out.

But only if you…

Listened to the Advice of A Decade Earlier

“I know that there is pain, but you..Hold on for one more day…Don't you know, things can change…Things'll go your way…If you hold... on for one more day…Can you hold... on for one more day? Things'll go your way”  - Wilson Phillips

“Sometimes everything is wrong…If you feel like letting go (hold on)...And everybody hurts sometimes…So hold on, hold on…Hold on, hold on, hold on” - REM

Or take it from actual investing legends

Take Charlie Munger for example - "It's waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait."

Or Peter Bernstein's advice that  "The more uncertain the outcome, the greater may be the value of procrastination"

Or a different kind of investor who said "Often we tell ourselves, "Don't just sit there, do something!" But when we practice awareness, we discover something unusual. We discover that the opposite may be more helpful, "Don't just do something, sit there!" We must learn to stop from time to time in order to see clearly. At first, "stopping" may look like a kind of resistance to modern life, but it is not. It is not a reaction; it is a way of life. Humankind's survival depends on our ability to stop rushing." -Thich Nhat Hanh

Can We Stop And See Clearly?

Or Will Tomorrow’s Noise Suck Us Back In?

We’ve got CPI, a 10Y auction, and the Bank of Canada on deck.

Is there a signal in all of this? Or are we just reacting to noise?

XTOD’s

XTOD: Charlie Munger's 5 investment skills to develop:  1.) The ability to keep raw irrational emotions under control. 2.) Patience. 3.) Discipline. 4.) An ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. 5.) The ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success.

XTOD: We have three currencies in life:

• Money

• Time

• Health

The cruel irony?   They're rarely abundant simultaneously:

Young: Rich in time and health, poor in money.

Middle age: Rich in money and health, poor in time.

Old age: Rich in money and time, poor in health.

XTOD: The private equity names are now all down 30-40% from the highs (!!!) so I think it's time for another juicy thread on the threat to capitalism as we know it.Let's begin:....Much much more to post in this thread but Twitter is cutting me off. We're all screwed, if that isn't apparent from the stock market today. This is just a taste.  Visit http://shortprivateequity.com for more.

https://x.com/InvestingCanons/status/1899248654939980132

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https://x.com/dailydirtnap/status/1899208071328444480

Daily Economic Update: March 11, 2025

Can you smell what The Rock is Cooking?

The Rock is a precipitous fall in equities, and the smell? That’s the whiff of stagflation. You caught it in the latest NY Fed SCE report::

•  “Median inflation expectations increased by 0.1 percentage point (ppt) to 3.1 percent at the one-year horizon”, 

• “The share of households expecting a worse financial situation one year from now rose to 27.4 percent, its highest level since November 2023.” 

•  “The mean probability that the U.S. unemployment rate will be higher one year from now—jumped up by 5.4 ppt to 39.4 percent in February, its highest reading since September 2023.”

A real feel-good story. And that smell might make you puke.

Worst Day of The Year For Equities

Not a banner day for growth investors, especially Tesla bulls. TSLA is now down nearly 50% from recent highs.

T-Bill and Chill seems to be the winning strategy so far this year.

Not Investment Advice but - “This too shall pass”

According to legend, the wise men finally boiled down the history mortal affairs into a single phrase, 'This too will pass’.  

What’s an investor to do?  

• Keep a long-term perspective focused on your personal goals.

• Understand that downturns are normal—and history favors the patient.

• Focus on underlying value and build in a margin of safety rather than chasing price action. 

• Remember: nobody can predict the future. 

• Adopt intellectual humility—be wary of anyone claiming certainty.

This has been the stance of this blog since the beginning. Warren and Charlie said it best:

“In order to succeed, you must first survive.”

“Never interrupt compounding unnecessarily.”

Smart.

With the Fed on blackout, we’ll see what leaks out of the Administration mouthpieces and what the JOLTS data brings next.

Do Central Bankers Run the World?

Imagine the U.S. public electing a former Central Banker to be President. In Canada, they basically did—granted, Mark Carney was head of the Bank of England, not Canada.

Still…

Central bankers should be easy targets in any campaign after the last 20 years.

Do Inflation Expectations Matter?

Quick history lesson:

Back in 2021, Jeremy Rudd at the Fed wrote a paper trashing the New Keynesian idea that inflation is driven by expectations. Rudd argued that “anchored expectations” became an excuse to adopt policy mistakes.

He suggested that real-world factors—like actual inflation and economic conditions—might give a better understanding of inflation dynamics.   Something to chew on while you read every inflation survey this week.

The Only Honest Answer:

“I Don’t Know.” It’s the right answer to just about everything in the markets.

Since I don’t know, I’d be happy to hear your takes in the comments - have at it.

I’d write more about the day ahead, but my blog experienced a “massive cyber-attack”.

XTOD’s:

XTOD: In our view, the market is discounting the last leg of a rolling recession, which will give the Trump Administration and the Powell Fed many more degrees of freedom than investors expect, setting up the US economy for a deflationary boom in the second half of this year!

XTOD: The S&P 500 just erased 9 months of gains in only 12 trading days...Markets can handle bad news, but not uncertainty.

XTOD: Plan appears to be more government at the border (trade and immigration) less government inside the border (doge and taxes). Rebalance the economy from the public sector to the private sector.   There’s obviously a price to pay for that. How big? I don’t know. How much pain are they willing to tolerate? More than people thought.

XTOD: I think it’s obvious that Twitter’s problem is Elon Musk working remotely and being too focused on DEI issues.

XTOD: Your ultimate success is governed by your ability to tolerate the uncertainty on the path to get there. The one who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the one who will eventually win.

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https://x.com/RobinWigg/status/1899150850573955534 https://x.com/SahilBloom/status/1899078997503365361

Daily Economic Update: March 10, 2025

Fed Blackout or Monetary K-Hole? You Decide.

The Fed has officially entered its blackout period, which is kind of like K-holing for central bankers—total silence, a dissociative state, and no ability to communicate about what's really going on.  

But before the dissociation kicked in, Powell reportedly locked eyes with a colorful toad (possibly a Stanford economist in disguise) who whispered four mystical words: Trade. Immigration. Fiscal. Regulation.   Powell then delivered his parting prophecy at the U.S. Monetary Policy Forum: "It is the net effect of these policy changes that will matter for the economy and for the path of monetary policy."

And with that, he slipped away into the ether… leaving the rest of us to interpret the signs, read the entrails, and argue over whether the toad was hawkish or dovish.

Markets Puke, Meta-Narratives Laugh

Speaking of blacking out, that might be what was experienced by some investors who checked their 401k statements, after the stock market had its worst week since September 2024.

We’ll start this week with the S&P down 6% from its recent high, trading at 5,770. It’s tempting to blame policy chaos for the recent sell-off. But zooming out, this all fits the two meta-narratives we’ve talked about since January.  Oh, you don’t remember  the two competing “meta-narratives"? One being the proverb that “trees don’t grow to the sky” with the competing narrative that “this time is different” and there are increasingly companies that are not subject to laws of diminishing returns and earn increasing returns from scale.  If you’re newer to this blog or just need a refresher, I recommend going backwards in order to move forward and giving a re-read to some of the post from the start of the year, starting here.

Powell’s Solid Labor Market: Funny How?

Friday’s Jobs Report, posted a headline of +151K and showed the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1%.  Weakness was seen in government employment and a household survey showing a sharp decline in the number of self-employed workers. And just before slipping fully into the blackout void, Powell reassured us that, "Many indicators show that the labor market is solid and broadly in balance. Smoothing over the month-to-month volatility, since September, employers have added a solid 191,000 jobs a month on average."  And that overall, “The economy has been growing at a solid pace.”

Solid? Solid how, Jerome? Like you’re saying it’s healthy? Strong? Or solid like it’s frozen? Or maybe solid like “cement shoes” solid? You’re telling me it’s “solid”—I’m just trying to understand here. I’m funny how? I amuse you? Solid how?

Speaking of Drugs, Does Someone Need Rehab?

If Powell’s ‘solid’ economy feels like cement shoes, Treasury Secretary Bessent thinks it’s more like an addict hitting rock bottom - “We have become addicted to this government sending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”

Bessent’s comments and the overall uncertainty don’t seem to be helping the market “vibes”.  For as bad as the “vibes” seem, are the vibes right now really all that different from those of last fall?  Am I wrong? Take a look at my post from back on November 1, 2024, when the S&P was trading at 5,716 and decide.

What’s different now appears to be the “t” word (well and about every other major category Powell mentioned above). 

Ben Stein Lectures Us - Anyone?

I told you I gave up the “t” word, but that doesn’t stop me from quoting Ben Stein as an economics professor from the 1986 classic, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

“In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. "Voodoo" economics.”

Let’s hope it all doesn’t go that 1930s direction.

The Week Ahead “Inflationpalooza”:

This week will be all about inflation, both inflation expectations and the CPI report on Wednesday.

Mon: NY Fed Consumer Inflation Expectations
Tue: JOLTS, 3Y Note Auction

Wed: CPI, Bank of Canada, 10Y Note Auction

Thur: PPI, Jobless Claims, 30Y Bond Auction

Fri: UofM Inflation Expectations

Chinese deflation to start the week, will it be U.S. inflation to end the week?  The 10Y treasury yield will start at 4.30% and the 2Y yield will start at 4.00%, where will they end the week is the question.

XTOD: Futures getting hammered to start the week. Bonds crushed. Dollar down. Gold flat.  No safe havens at the moment. Chaos.

XTOD: Bloomberg on China’s negative inflation data — not just PPI, which has been negative for a while, but also core and headline CPI.   These numbers will amplify concerns about the risk of  a self-reinforcing process of “Japanification” of the Chinese economy. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GlkmCxWXMAEUU77?format=jpg&name=small

XTOD: Our recent GDPNow updates stirred up a lot of conversation about the model’s subcomponents, including a trade deficit spurred on by an increase in nonmonetary gold imports. In an article and the thread below, Pat Higgins, creator of the GDPNow model, provides additional insight with a “gold adjusted” model and accounting for today’s (March 7) labor market report……“The topline growth forecasts also increased today—standard model -2.4% to -1.6%, “gold adjusted” model -0.4% to 0.4%—as data from today’s labor market report came in stronger than the model was expecting based on the limited February data the model received prior to that release.”

XTOD: "Lots of luck if you're an impulsive person who has to be gratified immediately. You're probably not going to have a very good life — and we can't fix you....That demand for immediate gratification is the way to ruin. It may also give you syphilis." 

- Charlie Munger 

Charlie's (younger)  partner, Warren Buffett always said that short term market forecasts are poison. Those that makes these sort of projections only make fortune tellers look good!

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Daily Economic Update: March 7, 2025

Queue Chris Tucker

Ignore the CNBC Market Sell-Off banner, sip your favorite tariffed tequila, buy a U.S. manufactured car - because it’s Friday and you ain’t got no job and you ain’t got shit to do.  

Jobs Day in ‘merica! Estimates peg +160K, unemployment at 4%, with X buzzing about weather rebounds and fed layoffs (DOGE’d or not). Challenger’s 172K layoffs—highest since ’09—scream recession, but weekly claims yawned.   Challenger job cuts this high tend to correlate with recessions, will this time be different?

What’s the French word for “Stagflation”

Our friends across the pond at the ECB cut 25bps as expected, citing slower growth estimates and uncertainty. What is the economic term when you have negative growth and rising inflation - Comment dit-on stagflation?  Anyway, -0.9% GDP growth with 2.3% inflation forecast for 2025…spells “baisses de taux” I guess.

In case you were wondering, they will remain “data dependent”. Nothing beats a “meaningfully less restrictive” policy stance while revising up your 2025 inflation forecast to 2.3% - whatever, long and variable lags, expectations, pick your catch phrase.

Don’t worry, Fed Governor Waller is in no mood to cut rates at the upcoming Fed meeting. He could still see two cuts later this year, but he’s data and the “t” word dependent.

With central bankers seemingly clueless, perhaps we need wisdom from one of the world’s greatest investors.

Ooh, a storm is threatening My very life today If I don't get some shelter Ooh yeah, I'm gonna fade away

While markets puke, the legendary Howard Marks dropped his latest memo, Gimme Credit, presumably a pun on the Rolling Stones hit Gimme Shelter. For Marks, credit’s your shelter when equities’ P/Es are drunk at current levels. 

A big takeaway from the memo is that current expected returns on credit are much better than what the expected return from equities has historically been when P/E’s are at current levels.  Marks also rebukes the concerns over spreads being historically narrow, saying: “The bottom line for me – as I tell anyone who asks – is that you can’t eat spread, or spend spread, or pay pension benefits with spread. For those things, you need returns. Spreads have to be assessed to ensure they’ll be adequate to offset credit losses, but in the end, it’s the total return that matters.”  Despite Marks speaking to the benefits of credit and private credit, he doesn’t dismiss the risk inherent in the rapidly growing private credit market.  For me, Marks is one of the best minds in thinking about risk and asset allocations.  In this memo, he references two of his recent memos, On Bubble Watch and Ruminating on Asset Allocation, which you can read my commentary about here and here respectively.

I gave up tariffs for Lent - so only econ data on the look ahead

I’ve written ‘tariff’ 100x this year—so for Lent, I’m giving it up. This Friday, we’ll just focus on Jobs data and whatever the man in the Orange Hat says (aka J-Pow, aka the Orange Powell Ranger)

We go into this Jobs Friday with S&P down at 5,720 - those darn globalists. The 2Y yield at 3.97% and the 10Y yield at 4.29%, where will things end if data is a bad miss vs. a big beat?

XTOD: Challenger Gray report: U.S.-based employers announced 172,017 job cuts in February, the highest total for the month since 2009 and the highest monthly total since July 2020 when 262,649 cuts were announced

XTOD: Tuesday: Trump slaps 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada

Wednesday: Trump exempts the auto industry

Thursday am: Trump exempts most Mexican imports

Thursday pm: Trump exempts most Canadian imports (though he still insults Canadian PM)

Meanwhile... Trump says more tariffs coming April 2.

This kind of whiplash is damaging to the economy. How can anyone plan? Or even understand what the real goal is here?

XTOD: The stock market is down but at least everything is more expensive and services are getting shittier. On the other hand we have more measles. To be fair, they are finally delivering the reductions in FAA and National Parks staff that people have been demanding.

XTOD: Let's call it how it is in terms of a scorecard. Since inauguration, SPX is down 4% and China FXI up 24%. Worse, the most prominent stocks i.e. "market generals": $NVDA down 22% and $BABA up 71%. Perhaps someone should explain to the President why (Masa Son, Tepper, Cook? )

XTOD: What you push down doesn’t vanish. It festers and wields quiet power over your thoughts and actions.  What needs to be addressed that isn’t currently being addressed?

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Daily Economic Update: March 6, 2025

Art of the Deal?

Tariffs are just negotiating tactics right?  Things are fluid on the tariff front with U.S. automobile manufacturers getting a one-month tariff reprieve, but the only fluids I’m focused on are stockpiling maple syrup and tequila.  The major equity indexes just ping-pong around based on headlines and the S&P 500 ended the day up 1.1% to 5,842.  Markets are optimistic that further tariff exemptions will be in play, but we’ll see.  In Trump’s address Tuesday night, he continues to channel his Powell J-Hole persona, indicating that there could be some pain as the economy adjusts to tariffs.  In the meantime markets are having hopium with guac.

ADP Flops, Payrolls Loom

Data time! ADP came in at half of estimates, printing 77K vs. estimates of +160K. Nobody trusts it to predict Friday’s BLS jobs report anyway where estimates are for a headline print of +160K with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.0%.  X is all about weather rebounds of course the impact of DOGE, though that impact is expected to be minimal in this reading.  Over at Bloomberg, Anna Wong has an article “Why February Nonfarm Payrolls Could Be a Big Bust”, she’s estimating a +65K and blaming Trump’s orders and weather.  If payrolls do print poorly Friday morning the real question is will Trump call another drop in bond yields “beautiful”?

Tariffs are the corporate equivalent of a teenage boy’s ‘bruh’

ISM services came in at 53.5, the 8th consecutive month of activity. The internals looked solid, with strong new orders. But on the inside the word “tariff” showed up 12 times in the report. The hospitality and food industry are screaming “chaos” over pricing, agriculture services have “uncertainty” keeping them up at night, the construction is whining about “cost”,  and IT and management consulting is worried about “ripple down effects”.  Maybe the latter category should just get McKinsey on the case.

Germany’s Wallet Wakes Up - Victory for Trump?

Germany spending money? It’s been a while, but higher defense spending and a EUR 500bln infrastructure plan are on the table. Will it clear the German political machine and become a reality?  I don’t know but the 10Y German Bund yield went up 28bps to 2.76%.  Trump’s hardball “Europe, pay up” approach to foreign policy might be working….might be.

On Deck: Will Jobless Claims get DOGE’d and 25bps from Lagarde

The impact of DOGE on federal employees could show up in jobless claims, we’ll see. Across the pond, the ECB is expected to cut 25bps to 2.5%, but we’ll all just want to know about tariffs.

We go into the day before Jobs with a 2Y Treasury at 4.01% and the 10Y at 4.28%. 

XTOD’s:

XTOD: Feels like a good time to remember this- If you invested in the S&P 500 every time CNBC had a "Markets in Turmoil" special?   Your average return after one year would be 40%, with a 100% success rate.

XTOD: Haven't seen a disaster like this in the European debt market since Liz Truss. 

If Europe wants to replace the United States in funding Ukraine, it is going to be extremely expensive and very politically costly.   How many working class Italians are going to want to fund Ukraine when their variable rate mortgage jumps up $200/month on April 1st?

XTOD: “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”   - Milton Friedman

XTOD: Some people, you'll never know that they're lunatics unless they get very rich.

XTOD: Every single thing you want in life is on the other side of something that sucks. That suck might be 100 hard workouts, 100 bland meals, 100 hours of focused work, or 100 hard conversations. Embrace it as the cost of entry. The answers you seek are found in the actions you avoid.

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Daily Economic Update: March 5, 2025

Where is my ‘Traders Clutching Their Heads’ calendar?

At this rate, I need my ‘Traders Clutching Their Heads’ calendar—and a tariffed tequila—to endure CNBC’s ‘Markets Sell-Off’ meltdown. S&P’s down to 5,778, as Canada is slapping 25% tariffs on ~$30 billion of our stuff, China’s got 15% of their own and Mexico promises tariffs of their own just as soon as they wake up from their siesta.  On top of that Ukraine’s aid is on pause, fiscal policy is a shoulder shrug emoji and we are heading towards a government shutdown. It’s a good time for me to launch my ETF, ticker TRASH - you see it’s just the S&P 500, but your statement goes straight to the trash so you don’t ever see it. As a result you can mark your position to whatever you like - or in other words it’s a PE Fund.

Tariff Wars: from UFC Flop to KO?

Tariff wars are kind of being in a UFC fight.  One fighter (Country A) throws a jab (initiates tariffs on goods from another country B), Country B punches back with tariffs of its own, but it’s all kind of the boring feeling-out part of the fight.  The bad fights stay that way, nobody’s winning, and really both fighters are losing as Dana White contemplates never booking the fighters again because they’re just bad at fighting. 

I’m not sure I want tariff wars to involve good fighters, but just like most UFC fights they tend to escalate out of the feeling-out phase, and sometimes someone really gets hurt.  As it relates to tariffs the escalation that follows is where additional goods are scoped into the tariffs.  From there you generally wait to see the effects, does the originally affected country shift exports to other countries, what is the impact on supply chains, what industries are impacted, and various other questions come into play.  In other words, after one fighter has taken the guy down, wrestled for position, he’s going to try to get the other fighter to tap out.  You just hope the fighter you're hoping wins is a black-belt in brazilian jiu jitsu.

Like a UFC fight, maybe someone wins outright or it goes on for a while and ultimately to the judges scorecard. In tariff wars, history tends to show they often end in long-term stalemates, partial decoupling and declines in trust between the countries involved. 

Thucydides's Trap, a MMA move?

Sticking with the UFC analogy, a bad outcome is the fading star fighter has a poor showing, gets called out on social media by the hungry up and comer and they decide they have to fight it out.  For tariffs, that worst case is what some political scientists term as Thucydides's Trap, a reference to the Peloponnesian War, and a theory that when the great hegemon is threatened by an emerging power, the end result is the escalating likelihood of a real war.  Some historians believe the attempts by Germany and others to isolate Great Britain in the late 19th century and start of the 1900s set in motion the web of alliances that led to WWI. 

I wrote this before Trump’s address to Congress last night, but perhaps we’ll learn more about the administration's tariff goals.  From what we know to date, we can generally say tariff goals fall into headings like border control, revenue generation, trade deficit reduction, protecting domestic industry and jobs and getting other countries to pay their fair share.

With the way these tariff negotiations go, we’ll probably have some deal or escalation, by the time this is published. 

NY Fed Williams took a break from R Star to sit down with Bloomberg and tell us nothing

Williams bailed on his R Star research to mumble ‘tariffs? dunno’ on Bloomberg—data-dependent as ever. Rate cuts?  Why bother asking him, your guess is as good as his. I do appreciate his fretting about inflation expectations and tariff price pops . Thanks, Johnny—I appreciate the Yellow Powell Ranger perspective as the cautious, number-crunching side kick to Powell.

The Knowledge and Service Economy Meets Tariffs

We’re a knowledge and service economy, don’t think tariffs matter there, we’ll see how many times the word “tariff” shows up in this month's report.  But the real action will be seeing whether by the end of Trump’s speech we’ve already changed tariff policies and ended all wars.

If both the stock market and the 10Y Treasury keep falling, at least we’ll get to test the theory that Trump doesn’t care about the stock market and is measuring success by falling 10 year yields.

XTOD’s

XTOD: Current drawdowns: S&P 500 -6%  Nasdaq 100 -9%  Russell 2000 -15%  Private Credit +0%

XTOD: Just checked my Private Credit marks, everything is still at par.  No worries over here.

XTOD: This is a classic rotation out of stocks and into poverty.

XTOD: For most investors: 99% of good investing is doing nothing, the other 1% is how you behave when the world is going crazy.

XTOD: No one on their deathbed ever said "I wish I'd beaten the S&P 500 by another point." 

They wish they'd spent time with family, travelled more, or worried less about money 

Your financial plan should serve your life, not your returns!  What financial goals matter most to you?

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