I still have vivid memories of my first market decline when I was working as a stockbroker. For the first two years of my career, nearly everything I recommended was going up. I was proud of the value I thought I was providing to my clients and impressed with how smart I was.

By 1969, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was getting close to an all-time high of 1,000. Then it started to decline and just kept going down. It eventually dropped almost 40%.

The situation hit me hard. I felt so bad about the losses my clients were experiencing that I couldn’t sleep and had stomach problems. To make things worse, a lot of my early clients were friends of my parents. When I would go home for a visit, I would call ahead and ask my parents to move their car out of the garage so I could park there and close the door behind me. I didn’t want my parents’ neighbors to know I was home because I couldn’t face questions about why their stocks were doing so poorly. I really didn’t know what to say because I didn’t have an answer. It was during this period that I spent one afternoon hiding out in the movie theater watching a Clint Eastwood triple feature!

Eventually, I went to my manager and asked for advice: What can I do? What should I say? He was surprised by my questions and responded bluntly with, “Keep trading stocks.” That was my job, after all. We were brokers, not financial advisors. We were paid to trade stocks because trading created revenue for our firm whether the stocks went up or down in our clients’ accounts.

Then he added something that turned out to be good advice for me. He said that if the market decline was bothering me that much, I should quit my job and go work in a bank trust department. He was right. I wasn’t interested in selling stocks to help a firm make money whether or not my clients won or lost..I left my brokerage job shortly thereafter.

Obviously, I’ve experienced many more market downturns since that fateful time…because that’s simply what the market does. We just can’t accurately predict when. In fact, there have been 10 times when the market declined more than 20% in the past 50 years—with the two most recent happening in 2007-2009 (down 55%) with the financial crisis and in March 2020 (down 35% in 21 days) with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lesson Learned: Expect that the market will decline and ignore it when it does. 

History shows that market declines are inevitable—higher equity returns wouldn’t be possible without the risk of occasional downturns. Also, market declines are temporary. When you remember these two facts, you’re less likely to let your emotions get in the way of your long-term investing strategy. After all, a loss isn’t a loss until you sell your position.

Of course, ignoring market downturns is easier said than done. I admit that I still feel anxious during these periods, and I know that many investors experience the same sleeplessness and pit-in-the-stomach sensations I felt back in 1969. Today, though, I’m not afraid to face my clients when the markets are bad.

Instead, I like to initiate calls during these rough periods just to ask how they’re feeling and to give them better advice than I could have 50 years ago. Instead of recommending new stock trades, I tell them to do nothing – except the occasional rebalance. This downturn, like others before it, will pass.

Also, I’ve learned, and communicated to all that will listen…especially our clients…to focus on what you can control. The market is not controllable. Your investing philosophy, asset allocation, and personal spending and savings are in your control. Focus your attention, energy, and actions there. And leave the rest to us.

Earlier this month, the entire Hill Investment Group team spent an inspiring afternoon touring the world-famous Anheuser-Busch (AB) brewery in St. Louis. Why? We are always learning and have drawn myriad lessons from the way AB continues to set the bar for excellence – for product craftsmanship, knowing their client, and being a pillar of the community. Did we mention the attention to detail, timeliness, reliability, data and evidence, and hospitality? And, fun fact, both Rick Hill and Buddy Reisinger are former “Miller killers” themselves.

When Rick and I set out to form a brand new firm more than 15 years ago, we drew inspiration from AB, as well as other examples of excellence. Some of our clients may catch the subtle nod in the photo above to our founders’ vision: that Hill Investment Group should feel to clients like a combination of The Four Seasons Hotel and Cheers!… where everybody knows your name.

If you’ve never been to our world headquarters in St. Louis, we’d love to host you on a tour of our offices…yes, we’re open…and invite you to experience our hospitality!

News outlets keep us informed which, in turn, gives us an intellectual edge over everybody else—so the theory goes. But what if the key to making better decisions was tuning out, rather than tuning in?

Maybe you’ve noticed this paradox: the more news you consume, the less informed you feel. That’s because news is, by definition, temporary. As soon as you form an opinion, a new headline comes along to cast doubt, and the cycle repeats.

This is especially true with financial news which plays on our fear of losing money, whether that’s missing the latest crypto trend or failing to hedge against inflation.

There’s a reason sensationalism goes viral. As Jason Gay noted in The Wall Street Journal, “Nobody gets clicks and famous for taking a long view; hell has to be served in a handbasket, preferably with a clever baiting headline.”

We’re not here to pick on financial writers; we’re here to point out how alarmist financial news chips away at our sanity. Finding and buying the latest hot stock offers an intoxicating thrill, like a lucky roll of the dice at a casino. But as a strategy to achieve long-term peace of mind, it’s doomed to fail.

Frantically refreshing your newsfeed to inform your investing strategy isn’t just inefficient, it’s exhausting. Human beings have a finite supply of mental energy, and trying to time the market day after day quickly zaps it. But once you get fed up with paying the biological (and monetary) price of attempting to outwit global capitalism, something clicks. At least it does for our clients who can take solace in the fact that they no longer have to pray that they uncover the needle in the haystack—they simply own the haystack…which already includes those needles!

In our world, we call this a “Long View Moment,” or as the writer, Oliver Burkeman says, “surrendering to the speed of reality.” It’s the sense of freedom when you realize that you don’t need to watch Squawk Box or jerk your head when you see a stock ticker.

When we let fantasies crumble (like the idea that you can “outsmart” the market), it clears the path for a new way of thinking where we embrace our limits instead of fighting them. Psychotherapists call this a “second-order change,” meaning it’s not just a behavioral tweak, but a change in perspective that reframes everything.

A change in perspective: that’s been the purpose of our newsletters, my podcast, and Hill Investment Group as a whole for years. We want to spread the word that building wealth doesn’t require tons of tiny decisions, but rather one big decision: to let go.

Once you abandon your attempt to manage the unmanageable, you can get to work on what really matters in life: spending time with loved ones, cultivating meaningful experiences, doing deep work.

Burkeman sums up this idea nicely in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

“When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go…you breathe a sigh of relief and begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential superpower: patience.”