I have spent several articles writing about investing theory. Frameworks, principles, mental models, etc.

But, as Benjamin Brewster put it in 1882: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

So with this article, I want to be real, and talk about practice.

Before we get into it, let me get something out of the way. Many out there are selling a dream. The brilliant call they made, the strategy that printed money, the portfolio you need to copy right now and so on. Nobody talks about when it goes wrong, so this article is about this side.

One of my positions is down 80% from its highs: MSTR. Full disclosure, I was relatively early into MSTR and I’m not yet underwater. But the drop from the high is vertiginous.

I watched the position go up multiples, and I didn’t take profits. So now, I’m watching those gains evaporate, live. The Greeks had a good story for this feeling. Sisyphus was condemned to push a boulder to the top of a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down each time he got close. That’s exactly what this feels like right now. The boulder got close to the top, I didn’t cash in and now I’m back at the bottom, pushing again.

I want to write about what that feels like, and how I’m handling it. Streaming live, no hindsight, no cleanup.

First, let me summarize how I see panic selling:

Buy, feel confident.

Market drops, feel sick.

Sell, feel relieved.

Market recovers, feel stupid.

I hold MSTR and BTC. BTC is down 50% from its high. MSTR is down 80%. On my panic-selling framework, I’m at stage one and a half. The market has dropped. But I don’t feel sick. Or not yet!

Am I happy about it? No. Am I stoically indifferent? Not a chance. The price is ugly, and there’s no way around it. I’m not pleased. But I’m not panicking either.

Two things are keeping me sane. 1. I think the thesis is intact. And 2. I’m able to hold without panic forcing my hand.

For me, managing panic comes down to answering two questions.

Why am holding?

Am I able to hold?

Why I’m holding

The price is ugly, and market sentiment is worse.

There’s a lot of negativity around the stock right now, ranging from legitimate questions to frustration to outright rage.

Do I dismiss what the bears say? Absolutely not. Being comfortable with the bear case matters more than being comfortable with the bull case. So I dig into their logic and ask myself what I might be missing.

My view is the thesis is intact. In the short term, stock prices are driven by fear and sentiment. In the long term, they come back to fundamentals. For me, MSTR’s fundamentals remain strong.

Sentiment is bad, yes, but fundamentals are solid and am investing in a thesis and not in feelings.

As Mike Tyson said: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

I had a plan. I knew that when an investment drops 20%, the world feels different. Imagine when it drops 80%.

I did the work. I got punched in the face, just like Tyson said. My mouth is bleeding. But I still remember I did the work.

My conviction is unchanged, and conviction is the only cure for panic. Either you did the work before you bought, or you’ll sell at exactly the wrong moment.

So what’s the conviction actually based on?

The full breakdown deserves its own post. This piece is about the system.

But here’s the short version.

We’re in a classic bear market, a typical 4-year cycle, and context matters. Bitcoin’s network fundamentals have never been stronger: record hashrate, growing institutional and sovereign adoption, policy momentum moving in the right direction. Price and value are two different things, and right now the price is reflecting fear, not a structural change in the underlying asset.

We’ve seen this movie before. Bitcoin has absorbed every crisis thrown at it: Mt. Gox, the 2017 block wars, the Chinese mining ban, Terra, FTX, the 2020 crash. Every time, the network came out stronger. Nothing in the fundamentals points toward the bear case.

MSTR is a leveraged bet on Bitcoin, harder up and harder down. That’s the design. Importantly, the balance sheet is strong, and management has shown it runs MSTR through pragmatism. Yes, they’ve sold coins. Many saw that as a betrayal. I see it differently. It helps with S&P 500 inclusion criteria, improves credit ratings, and signals to creditors that the company can act. Agile treasury management is a requirement for a good CEO. I like it.

Why I can hold

When the RMS Titanic set sail in 1912, it was a marvel of modern engineering. Grand staircases, a heated swimming pool, squash courts, even a Turkish bath. And yet, for all that engineering, the builders made a fatal call: they prioritized flashy features over boring safety.

To maximize deck space for first-class passengers, they fitted the ship with 20 lifeboats. Enough room for half the 2,224 people on board. Their bet was that any trouble would be minor, and another ship would be close enough to help. Why wouldn’t it?

Pouring every spare dollar into the market without an emergency fund is the Titanic without lifeboats.

Yes, the emergency fund is boring. It’s taking up space where exciting investments could go, more BTC, more MSTR, more whatever. But when the iceberg hits, the boring stuff is what keeps you afloat.

I have enough lifeboats.

What do I actually control?

Nothing, apart from my reaction.

First, an honest self-check. Am I sleeping? Yes. Though I owe you some honesty here. My tolerance for volatility is genuinely high. Everyone’s built differently. I’ve also been in markets for 20 years, as a professional and on my own account. I’ve seen a lot. I’ve made plenty of mistakes. All of that helps, to a point.

But to be clear: nobody knows how this movie ends. My MSTR and BTC call might turn out to be completely wrong. Who knows? As Socrates put it, I know that I know nothing.

If fundamentals were to change tomorrow, I’d bow out and call it a wrong call. But they haven’t. My conviction is intact and I’m here for the long run.

So the only real question is whether to add. I already did, reached my cap and I’m not adding more. That’s the other trap: buy the dip, buy the dippy dip, buy the dippity dip.

That’s it, my friend. Get a lifeboat. Do the homework. And don’t rent a strategy from someone whose nightmares look nothing like yours. Including me.

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This publication is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or tax advice.

Some people can buy a global index fund, set up the monthly contribution, and never think about it again. They are Minimalists, and they sleep beautifully because of it.

This is the best way to invest. It’s not glamorous. The global index quietly outperforms most professional investors over twenty years, costs almost nothing, requires no maintenance, and lets you spend your weekends doing literally anything else.

If you can do this and walk away, do this. Stop reading. Go live your life.

But maybe you can’t walk away, my friend.

You read. You notice things. You have views, and the views don’t go away just because someone tells you the market is efficient. You watched a sector quietly compound and felt the itch. You sat through a dinner where a smart person made a case for something, and you couldn’t stop thinking about it on the drive home.

You want skin in the game. Specifically, your skin.

If that’s you, I’m not here to scold you.

The urge to participate is human, and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. It just makes it leak into your portfolio in the worst possible way, in a single oversized trade made on the day a headline finally gives you permission.

So here’s the deal. There’s a framework that lets you act on your views without blowing yourself up.

It’s called Core-Satellite.

Pension funds and endowments have used it for decades. The idea is simple: separate the money that does the compounding from the money that expresses your views. Keep them in different zones. Don’t let them bleed into each other.

What is Core-Satellite?

Picture a solar system.

Your core is the sun. The massive, steady center that anchors your entire financial universe.

Your satellites are the smaller planets orbiting around it. They move faster and carry more potential, but the core’s gravitational pull keeps the whole system stable.

By separating your money this way, you balance the steady compounding of passive investing with the targeted expression of active views.

To navigate this structure, I apply a framework I call The 3 Bs: Baseline, Boost, and Buffer.

How to stack your 3 Bs: Baseline, Boost, Buffer

The portfolio divides into 3 functional layers.

1. The Baseline (Your Core)

The Baseline is your anchor. Broadly diversified, low cost, set once and left alone. The gold standard here is a Global Index ETF. One purchase. Thousands of companies. The whole planet. Another broad index works too. I prefer the Global Index.

The Goal: Steady, reliable, long-term growth.

The Vibe: Boring, predictable, and hands-off.

The Math: Most investors allocate 70% to 90% of their total portfolio here.

2. The Boost (Active Satellites)

This is where your views get a defined home. Individual high-growth stocks, sector-specific ETFs, digital assets, or other growth assets.

The Goal: Accelerate returns where you have genuine conviction.

The Vibe: Active, higher risk.

The Rule: Size it so being wrong is survivable.

3. The Buffer (Defensive Satellites)

This is the protection layer. Uncorrelated assets that don’t move with the stock market, designed to absorb the impact when markets get stormy. Gold has historically played this role.

The Goal: Protect the portfolio when everything else falls together.

The Vibe: Defensive, lower risk.

The Rule: Small enough that it doesn’t drag returns in good times.

The mix: You don't have to use all 3. Some investors run just a Baseline and a Boost, a foundation with a growth bet on top. Others prefer a Baseline and a Buffer, steady compounding with a shock absorber underneath. And some run all 3, a Baseline doing the heavy lifting, a Boost for conviction, a Buffer for protection. Pick the combination that matches your personality and your sleep.

What this looks like with real money

To make this concrete, imagine you have $10,000 to invest with an 80/20 split.

The Baseline ($8,000): A Global Index ETF. Zero day-to-day management required.

The Satellites ($2,000): Split however fits your situation. You can dedicate $1,000 to a high-growth ETF (Boost) and $1,000 to a gold ETF (Buffer).

If your Boost investments crash, your $8,000 Baseline keeps compounding in the background. If the market dips, your Buffer softens the blow. You never risk your financial future on a single conviction.

You don’t have to be 100% boring or 100% reckless. A strong Baseline, a smart Boost, and a reliable Buffer. That’s a portfolio you can actually hold.

What you are actually buying with this framework

Core-Satellite is not a guarantee of better returns. Plenty of Satellites underperform their Core for years and never come back. That’s a real outcome you have to be ready for.

What the structure delivers is something quieter and more useful. It gives your judgment a place to live. It keeps your convictions from contaminating your compounding. It lets you participate in the parts of the market you genuinely believe in, sized so the wrong bets don’t wipe out the right ones.

When a Satellite goes wrong, the Core keeps compounding.

When a Satellite goes right, you get to feel like you participated.

Both outcomes are survivable. Both are better than the version where you suppress the urge until it explodes into one oversized panic trade.

You get to have views. You get to put real money behind them. But you cap them, you size them, and you behave like an adult about them.

That’s it, my friend. Have your views. Cap the bets. Then go live your life.

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This publication is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or tax advice.

For most of human history, money was anchored to physical metal, with gold as the ultimate standard. Then, on a Sunday night in August 1971, the last thread of that system was cut.

Richard Nixon went on television and announced that the United States would no longer honor its promise to convert dollars into gold. The Bretton Woods system, which had anchored the world’s currencies to gold, was effectively over by Monday morning. Every currency in the world became a fiat currency, meaning it was backed by nothing except the credibility of the government issuing it.

An ounce of gold cost $35 that night. Today it costs somewhere north of $4,000. In the 55 years since Nixon spoke, an ounce of gold hasn’t changed. The dollar has just quietly lost about 99% of its ability to buy one.

That fact, and everything downstream of it, is why I hold gold. But first, let me deal honestly with the strongest case against it.

Gold produces nothing. So what?

Gold produces nothing. It doesn’t pay dividends. It doesn’t generate cash flow. It doesn’t grow the way a business grows. If you buy an ounce today and hold it for 30 years, you own the same ounce. Meanwhile that same ounce has cost you money to store and insure the whole time. Its baseline yield is slightly negative.

That is all true.

The counter-argument is not that gold is productive. It’s that productivity isn’t the only thing an asset can offer. So why gold?

1. Gold cannot be printed

Our financial system runs on fiat currencies, and fiat currencies have one structural weakness: they can be debased. This is how it works in practice. Governments spend more than they collect in taxes. They issue bonds to cover the gap. When that debt pile grows large enough, central banks step in and create new money to buy it, expanding the money supply and reducing the purchasing power of every unit of currency already in circulation. Nobody votes on this. It just happens, quietly, in the background, while you sleep.

Between 2020 and 2022, the US money supply expanded by roughly 40%, the most dramatic peacetime monetary expansion in modern history. True inflation is the expansion of the currency itself, and the symptom is higher prices. The dollar you held in 2020 bought meaningfully less by 2022. That wealth wasn’t spent. It was simply diluted.

Gold’s supply grows by roughly 1.5% to 2% a year, limited by what can physically be mined. No central bank can double it overnight. That property alone makes it structurally different from any currency on earth.

This isn’t a prediction that the dollar will collapse. It’s a recognition that over long enough horizons, fiat currencies have a structural tendency to debase, and the assets that cannot be created out of nothing have tended to hold their value against that erosion.

That's the monetary case. But gold's structural argument doesn't stop there.

2. Gold is a neutral asset, with no counterparty risk

In a world where financial systems have become tools of geopolitical conflict, gold’s unique property is its neutrality.

It cannot be frozen, sanctioned, or switched off. It belongs to whoever holds it physically, regardless of which country they live in or which institutions they depend on. For central banks quietly diversifying away from dollar reserves, that neutrality is worth paying for. For an everyday investor, it is worth understanding.

Physical gold doesn’t need a bank to be solvent, a government to be stable, or a network to be running. In genuine systemic stress, this property becomes valuable in a way it isn’t during normal times. But there is a third property that matters just as much for your portfolio’s long-term behavior.

3. Gold is an uncorrelated asset

Correlation is the measure of whether 2 assets move together. A portfolio full of assets that all move together isn’t diversified, no matter how many positions it holds. If every line item goes down on the same bad day, you own 1 big bet.

Gold has historically had low or negative correlation with equities, particularly during equity crises.

In 2008, gold rose while stocks collapsed. In the early 1970s, gold surged as inflation destroyed both stock and bond returns. It is not a perfect hedge, and there have been moments when gold and equities have fallen together, notably in the initial 2020 liquidity panic. But over long cycles, gold’s return pattern is genuinely different from equities.

That different pattern is what earns gold a place in a portfolio as a buffer. And if the structural argument isn’t enough, look at who is actually putting real money behind it.

You’d be surprised who’s buying gold.

Central banks are buying. This one won’t surprise you. They have been net buyers of gold for over a decade, and the pace has accelerated in recent years. Emerging market central banks in particular have been quietly building reserves. The stated rationale is diversification away from the dollar, and reduced dependence on any single reserve currency. That is the neutrality argument in practice, playing out at sovereign scale.

But there is a more interesting buyer in town. In the hyper-modern world of digital finance, gold has quietly returned in massive size. Tether, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin, isn’t just dabbling. They have been sweeping up billions of dollars in physical gold to hold on their corporate balance sheet. Apart from Poland, no national central bank on the planet purchased more physical gold in 2025 than this single private crypto firm. The sight of the most modern financial instruments leaning on the most ancient asset is worth noticing.

When the most patient and sophisticated buyers in the world are quietly accumulating something, it is worth digging further.

So is it time to buy?

Here is the honest answer to the timing question. If you have read this piece and concluded that gold does not belong in your stack, then no price is the right price. A cheaper version of the wrong asset is still the wrong asset.

If you have read this piece and concluded that gold does belong in your stack, then a 25% correction simply means you are acquiring those structural properties at a discount. The inability to be printed. The absence of counterparty risk. The neutrality. The uncorrelated return pattern.

Think about what you are actually buying at a lower price.

Since Nixon spoke in 1971, the amount of gold in the world has more than doubled. The amount of dollars has grown more than 30 times. Let this thought sink in.

Gold's supply grows at 1.5% to 2% a year. Money's supply grows at 6% to 7%, and much faster in stress periods. That asymmetry has never gone away, and unless the printers slow down below the pace of the mines, it never will. The dollar has been searching for gold ever since.

It doesn't mean the bottom is in. Nobody knows where that is, and those who wait for confirmation tend to miss the rally. What it does mean is a significantly lower entry price for anyone with a long enough horizon.

That’s it, my friend. The gold case is strong. Time to do your own digging.

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This publication is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or tax advice.

Think back to your last raise.

Maybe it was 3%. Maybe 8%. Perhaps a bigger jump tied to a promotion, or a brand new job altogether. For a few weeks, it felt good, so good.

You probably told someone, did something special, treated yourself or your loved ones. It was great.

Now, answer this honestly. Where is that money today?

For most of us, it has just sort of … vanished.

Your rent didn’t double, you didn’t buy a boat, you can’t pinpoint to anything drastic that has changed. The raise somehow dissolved into the texture of your weeks. A few more coffees out, a slightly bigger grocery bill, the streaming bundle that upgraded itself somewhere along the way, the dinner out that became two dinners out, more vacations.

Economists call this the hedonic treadmill.

You get a raise, your spending widens to absorb it, your baseline resets, and a few months later the new salary feels like the normal one.

The raise is still there, technically. You just can’t feel it anymore.

So when somebody suggests you might want to save more, the answer is almost always the same. I’d love to, but I can’t really afford it right now.

I hear you, the new budget really does feel tight. There isn’t an obvious 5% sitting around waiting to be redirected. The money is spoken for, by habits that arrived so quietly you never sat down and decided on them.

Now don’t get me wrong, in some instances it is what it is. It’s tight, and there is not much margin to maneuver. But in many cases there is, and that’s what we are looking at here.

Save more, starting tomorrow

In 1996, the economist Richard Thaler, along with his colleague Shlomo Benartzi, ran into this exact wall. They were trying to help employees at a mid-sized company save more for retirement, and the employees kept giving them the same answer. We can’t afford it.

So Thaler and Benartzi tried something different. They didn’t ask employees to save more today. They asked them to agree to one thing. Every time they got a raise, in the future, a small slice of it - say two or three percentage points - would route automatically into their retirement account.

They called the program Save More Tomorrow. Thaler would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017.

Over the next 40 months, the average savings rate of participants went from 3.5% to 13.6%. Almost four times higher. Importantly, nobody felt poorer.

The escalations happened before the raises ever joined the budget. There was nothing to give up, because there was nothing yet to give.

Before life gets there first

Two things are happening at once with Save More Tomorrow, and they happen to fit together beautifully.

The first is that it gets ahead of the treadmill. If a raise lands in your account and sits there for a few weeks, your spending will find it. You don’t even need to decide. Your standard of living quietly stretches a little, and three months later, the idea of saving that slice feels impossible, because life has already moved into the space. Save More Tomorrow gets there first. The money never touches the floor.

The second is the one I find fascinating. Humans are not great at thinking about their future selves.

When researchers ask people to make a choice on behalf of “future me” we tend to be a bit more disciplined, a bit more virtuous, a bit more aspirational than we’d be if we had to do the thing today. We treat our future selves a little like a slightly more responsible version of ourselves we don’t quite know. We’ll happily volunteer them for things we’d never volunteer ourselves for today.

Save More Tomorrow puts both of these on the same line. The treadmill never gets a chance to grab the money, and the person making the decision isn’t being asked to give anything up right now.

Willpower doesn’t stand a chance

Most advice on saving sort of assumes the missing ingredient is willpower. Save more, spend less, stick to a budget. Try harder. Save More Tomorrow points to something gentler. The problem most of the time isn’t really how disciplined you are. It’s that by the time the money is in your account, your life is already in the room, negotiating for it. And willpower, against a room full of small habits, tends to lose.

The fix is to make the decision before the money arrives.

• If your employer offers an auto-escalation option on your retirement contributions, that’s the easy version. Check the box once, and the rest takes care of itself.

• If they don’t, the principle still works. You can decide today, ahead of time, what percentage of your next raise you’d like to put aside for your future self, before the money lands, before life sees it.

But before any of that, do this little exercise again. Picture your last raise, and ask yourself, gently, where it ended up.

If you can’t quite say, you’ve already met the Thaler idea. And maybe, just maybe, the next one doesn’t need to disappear the same way.

That’s it my friend. Save a little more, tomorrow.

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This publication is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or tax advice.

The word “bubble” is everywhere right now, and the debate is incredibly polarized.

The bears argue AI valuations have left reality behind.
The bulls counter that AI is a transformation at generational scale and the valuations are perfectly rational.

Pick a camp, you’ll find clever people sitting in it, dead sure.

Before we pick sides in a future post, let’s go back to basics. What is a bubble?

Yes, exactly. What is a bubble?

Every bubble in history follows the same five stages. Charles Kindleberger laid them out in Manias, Panics, and Crashes, 1978. Let’s go through them.

1. Displacement

Something big has to change. A new technology lands, a new market opens, money gets cheap, the rules of the game shift. That matters a lot, because bubbles almost never start from nothing. They start with something solid, then travel far past what it could ever justify.

2. Euphoria

The early buyers make a fortune and word gets around, so more money piles in. Higher prices pull in more buyers, more buyers push prices higher, and the whole thing starts feeding itself.

3. Mania

Everyone is in. Your neighbor, the cab driver, the colleague who suddenly knows about options. Prices stopped making sense ages ago, but nobody wants to hear it, because the number keeps climbing and the guy muttering “careful now” keeps being wrong, and looking like a fool.

4. Distress.

The smart money quietly heads for the door. New buyers thin out, and a few cracks show. The mood shifts and doubt starts gaining momentum.

5. The crash

Pop. Too many people trying to leave through too small a door. Prices fall, the falling triggers more selling, and the loop that built the whole thing runs in reverse. The story that made everyone rich gets rewritten overnight as obvious madness, and the people standing in the wreckage wonder how they didn’t see it coming.

There are bubbles and there are bubbles

Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez spent decades studying why tech revolutions trigger financial manias. Her answer is fascinating.

Technological revolutions attract bubbles. They need them.

The mania pulls in way more capital than anyone in their right mind would commit. But that’s the point. That’s what funds the infrastructure. And when it all collapses, the valuations disappear but the infrastructure doesn’t. It stays in the ground. The next generation picks it up at a discount and builds the next economy on top of it.

Look at the track record.

• The tulip bubble left just a story.

• But the Railway bubble of the 1840s left Britain the densest rail network in the world.

• The dot-com bubble wiped $5 trillion off the NASDAQ but left behind the fiber that made YouTube, cloud computing, and the modern internet possible.

Cold comfort for the investors who got wiped out. But worth keeping in mind.

So how to spot a bubble

First, drop the idea that spotting one is the hard part. People called the dot-com bubble for years before it popped. People called 2008. The skeptics weren’t wrong, they were early, which in markets is the same as being wrong until suddenly it isn’t. Timing is the hardest part.

The real work is figuring out which stage you’re in.

• Displacement. Something real changed. Has the price already run past what the change is actually worth?

• Euphoria. Are the professional investors who used to say “too expensive” suddenly changing their tune?

• Mania. Is the general public in? Is the buying running on borrowed money? Are companies inventing new ways to push money into the trade?

• Distress. Are the early believers quietly heading for the exit? Is doubt creeping into rooms where it wasn’t allowed a month ago?

• Crash. If you’re asking, you’re already in it.

None of these look like red flags in the moment. They all come with a perfectly good explanation. That’s precisely why bubbles work.

What it means for you

Before we look at the market, look at yourself.

If you are obsessively asking “is this a bubble?”, that is your real red flag.

Not for the asset, but for your conviction.

It means you don’t believe in the thesis. You might be operating on FOMO. You will panic-sell at the first 10% drop. You will sell at the exact bottom, even if the bubble wasn’t real to begin with.

Timing the bubble won’t save you. If you’re in doubt, don’t jump in. That’s it, my friend.

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Last week I wrote about sleep-adjusted returns and the stack that builds them: the Baseline, the Boost, and the Buffer. The Baseline is where every stack begins, so it is where we begin too.

But first, let me tell you a story.

In 1989, Japan was the world. At the peak of its bubble, Japanese stocks made up 45% of the MSCI World Index, and eight of the ten largest companies on the planet were Japanese. If you opened a serious investing textbook that year, it would have explained why it all made sense, pointing to superior management, patient capital, and a uniquely disciplined economy.

Then the bubble popped. The Nikkei lost more than 60% in three years, and Japan’s slice of the global market shrank from 45% to around 6%, which is roughly where it sits today.

Picture two investors in 1989. The first was sure Japan was the future and went all-in. The second built a globally diversified portfolio and went to bed. Fast-forward 35 years, and the first one is still in the red waiting to break even, while the second owned the rise of the US, the emergence of China, the biotech revolution, and the AI boom, all of it happening in the background even though he saw none of it coming.

That is the heart of a baseline only strategy: own the world in a single fund, and go to bed.

Who this is for

The Baseline is for the Minimalist, the person who values simplicity, automation, and peace of mind above almost everything else. Your 3am cortisol trigger is the stress of having to make too many decisions in the first place

The Baseline as a whole portfolio is one fund, set once, left alone. Fewer decisions means less doubt, and doubt is what costs you money. Because doubt is what fuels the urge to fiddle and to second-guess a plan that was working fine before you started looking at it. The Minimalist solves that problem by removing the decisions, not by getting better at making them. That’s it.

If that is you, the next question is the one every Minimalist asks first.

But why not buy the S&P 500?

If you have watched the US market for the last fifteen years, the question writes itself. The S&P 500 has demolished everyone else, and with Apple, NVIDIA, and Google doing the heavy lifting, the obvious move is to stick with the winners and let them run.

Owning the world does not leave the winners behind, and it is not a bet against the US either.

The US is already 60% of the global market, so when you buy the world, you are heavily invested there by default. You own America’s winners, along with the winners in China, Europe, and everywhere else on the planet.

What you avoid is the bet that any single country stays on top forever. That bet ruined investors in 1989, and it ruined them in 1929 too, when the US market crashed and took decades to fully recover.

If you have a genuine conviction that the US will keep outperforming the rest of the world, that is fine. You can layer a strategic US tilt over your global baseline without losing your safety net.

The Minimalist bet

When you buy a global index, you are making one bet, and only one: that somewhere on earth, human beings will keep figuring out how to do things better. You are not betting on a country, a sector, or a CEO. You are betting on the species, and you are doing it in a single click.

That bet has paid out every century so far. The names on the leaderboard keep changing, but the leaderboard itself keeps climbing.

Look at what is inside the fund right now and you own a slice of the world’s most productive assets, including Apple’s software, TSMC’s chips, Novo Nordisk’s drugs, and Toyota’s engineering, all of it sitting in a single wrapper.

Importantly, it is a self-updating ledger. When companies grow their weight rises, and when they fade it shrinks, so nobody had to “sell” Japan in 1990, because Japan simply got smaller as the US got bigger, with no extra trades, no extra taxes, and no extra fees. The index quietly retires yesterday’s giants and promotes tomorrow’s, while you sleep.

The trade-off

The baseline is not a walk in the park. It does not ask for sophisticated financial work, but it asks for solid emotional discipline.

It is hard to hold in bull markets, when your neighbor is getting rich on some hot stock and you are “only” owning everything.

It is hard to hold in bear markets, when every headline screams run to the hills.

And it is hard to hold in quiet markets too, when boredom starts whispering that there must be something smarter you could be doing.

There is no free lunch here. You give up the hope of picking THE winner, and in exchange you own every winner the next century produces. That is the deal.

That’s it. If you are a minimalist, own the world, and go peacefully to bed.

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This publication is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or tax advice.

We assume the hard part of investing is finding the right strategy. The right asset, the right timing, the right thesis.

But there’s something harder: sitting still long enough for a simple plan to work.

Take owning the world through a low-cost index fund. On paper, it’s not complicated. It captures the growth of the biggest companies on the planet, it costs almost nothing, and the track record speaks for itself.

Yet holding it for thirty years is a genuine struggle. Why? Because the market will test you my friend, again and again.

It will terrify you with panic when things fall apart.

It will tempt you with FOMO when things are hot.

And it will bore you into fiddling when nothing happens at all.

Let’s go through them, one by one.

1. The bear market: the panic test

This is the heavyweight. Books on books have been written about it.

When the market drops 20%, the world feels different. I know you do have a plan. But as Mike Tyson said: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. The temptation, every time, is to move to cash, until the dust settles, until clarity returns, until whatever. You’re not selling forever, just stepping aside while things sort themselves out.

The trap is that this isn’t one decision, it’s two. You have to call the top to get out. Then call the bottom to get back in. You have to be right twice.

Miss the ten best days of a twenty-year stretch and you cut your final balance in half. Miss the twenty best days and you cut it by two-thirds.

The best days sit next to the worst ones, often in the same week. The longer you wait for clarity, the more of them you miss.

That’s the first test.

2. The bull market: the FOMO test

When markets are climbing, your boring portfolio does exactly what it’s supposed to. It climbs too. For a while, that feels like enough. Great.

Then the noise starts. That friend who doubled their money on a fintech small-cap. The influencer bragging about 90% on leveraged calls. The colleague who won’t stop talking about his AI portfolio.

Suddenly your steady 10% feels too small and too slow. You feel like a loser. FOMO kicks in, and the appetite for speculation rises with it.

As the old saying goes, “comparison is the thief of joy.” Careful, in investing, it’s also the thief of wealth.

Maybe it works out. You could be carried with more momentum. Yes it’s possible, but by the time a theme is loud enough for you to hear about it everywhere, you’re usually buying the top.

Dalbar’s annual study of investor behavior has tracked this for decades. The average equity fund investor underperforms the very funds they own, by 2-3% a year, mostly because they chase what just worked and sell what just didn’t.

That’s the second test.

3. The sideways market: the boredom test

This one is the sneakiest, because nothing dramatic is happening.

The market isn’t crashing, isn’t ripping. It’s just dear boring, flat. For a few months, maybe a year. Maybe more, the way US stocks were from 2000 to 2013 if you bought the peak.

So you start to tinker. You read about options, leverage, maybe some covered calls. You wonder if you should add this or that. You build complexity, and you feel adding productive value doing it.

But productivity and progress are not the same thing.

Every layer you add has a cost, a fee, a tax drag, a new decision to manage.

And every layer is one more place the plan can break.

The boring portfolio was never broken. You just got bored of it working.

That’s the third test.

Keep your eyes on the prize

Big institutions build committees and mandates to stop themselves making emotional calls. They still make them, because committees are made of people. You are your own committee. The market will test you, and at least three moments will try to break you.

Now, repeat this after me: Say no to panic when it’s scary. No to FOMO when the market is hot. No to fiddling when it’s flat.

That’s it. Just a few nos my friend.

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Every investor chases the same number: the return.

But almost nobody talks about the other number: the hours of sleep you lost to get it.

An investment strategy that earns you 15% a year but costs you years of 3am cortisol-peak-triggered wake-ups is not as good as it looks. It brings a tax on your nervous system, which we need to talk about much more.

The data on what financial stress does to people is pretty alarming.

• Roughly one in three American adults loses sleep over money.

• Studies have found that sleep-deprived investors underperform the market by around 5% a year, mostly because they make the wrong calls when their cognitive function is wrecked.

• Losing just an hour and a half of sleep cuts your mental alertness by about a third.

Your no-fuss strategy is the one that maximizes your sleep-adjusted return.

In other words, the wealth you build minus the stress you spend building it.

Sleep is personal

If many of us are members of the 3am club with various-frequency visits, chances are the trigger for each one of us is entirely different depending on our life circumstances, personalities, and many other factors.

Same with investing, we don’t all lie awake for the same reasons.

Some of us stare at the ceiling because the market dropped 10% and our savings are bleeding out. Others stare because the market climbed 30% and they weren’t in it.

The behavioral research is clear that the first kind of pain is sharper. Losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good. Fear of loss is the heavyweight. But fear of missing out is real too.

Both are the same insomnia wearing different pajamas. And guess what? Both will trick you into exiting a good strategy at the wrong moment.

Put a price tag on volatility

This is where the Stoics save the day. Their one big idea: focus only on what you can actually control. So what can you control, really?

In investing, you can’t control much when it comes to the outcome. Not which sector wins next year. Not whether the Fed cuts, holds, or panics, someone starts a war, or a pandemic hits.

You can control how much money you invest, which asset you buy, and your time horizon (when to buy and sell).

Wait a second, do you really control when to buy and sell? Put differently, does your rational self control it? It all depends on your ability to stomach volatility.

What you can control, however, is how much of your sleep you hand over to any of it. And then build the portfolio that protects it.

If you sleep, you are most likely to stick to your initial plan.

When you strip away the institutional jargon, managing this balance usually comes down to how you arrange a few basic building blocks. Think of it as a stack of one to three layers. Each layer stands on its own, and you can stop wherever feels right.

1. The Baseline

The Profile: The Minimalist. You value simplicity, automation, and peace of mind above almost everything else.
The 3am Trigger: Analysis paralysis. The stress of making too many decisions.
The Setup: A single broadly diversified core fund, one wrapper that holds thousands of companies across many sectors.
The Logic: Owning a slice of the productive economy, and going to bed.

The Baseline is for the minimalist. One fund, set once, left alone. Fewer decisions means less doubt, and doubt is what costs you money, the urge to fiddle, to check, to second-guess a plan that was fine before you started looking at it.

2. The Boost

The Profile: The Explorer. You’ve done the homework. You want a say.
The 3am Trigger: FOMO. Watching your thesis play out without you.
The Setup: The Baseline, plus a small carve-out for the thing you believe in.
The Logic: Most of the wealth on autopilot, but a slice with your signature on it.

The Boost is for people who can’t sit still through one-fund indexing. You spotted a trend, did the homework, and want a small seat at the table. The carve-out should be a junior partner, never the senior one, small enough that being wrong about it doesn’t undo years of compounding from the Baseline.

3. The Buffer

The Profile: The Guardian. You know markets trend upward over time, but systems occasionally break.
The 3am Trigger: Tail risk. The moment the system wobbles.
The Setup: The Baseline, with or without a Boost, plus a thin layer of a non-correlated asset. Historically, that role has been played by gold.
The Logic: Adding a shock absorber.

When equities have one of those ugly weeks where everything correlated falls together, the Buffer moves differently and holds some value, a reminder that the whole portfolio hasn’t lit on fire.

So which stack is yours?

Be honest about what you can sleep through, and then own the portfolio that matches.

Don’t rent a strategy from someone whose nights look nothing like yours.

That’s it. Just sleep.

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If you invest for 20 years, you’ll sit through roughly 5,040 trading days.

Most of them are likely to be meh… boring. Time passes, the news churns and the market drifts while your portfolio does the slow work of compounding in the background.

Sure, it all sounds unexciting. But not all days are the same. Hidden in those 5,040 days are about 10 that do half the work.

If you miss them, you are likely to hand back more than half of what twenty years of patience was supposed to buy you.

It sounds crazy. I hear you, but let’s take a look at the data.

J.P. Morgan ran the numbers on the S&P 500 over a 20-year stretch (2006–2025) with two investor profiles, both starting with $10,000.

• The first investor did nothing, sitting through the pain spanning wars, pandemics, and financial crises. He ended up with about $80,619, which is an 11.0% annual return.

• The second investor tried to time the market. When the headlines turned red, he ran for the hills, moving to cash. While waiting to figure out if and when the bottom was in, he missed the 10 best days, and ended up with a final balance of $35,866 - a 6.6% annual return.

A nearly $45,000 gap paid in full for the comfort of stepping aside.

And it keeps going.

Miss 20 of the best days → 3.8% a year.
Miss 30 → 1.6% a year.
Miss 40 → minus 0.3% a year.

Less than you put in.

Why do the best days hide inside the worst ones?

One could picture the best days as happy glory days with green tickers, positive headlines, and uplifting newspaper headlines. But the data paints a dramatically different picture.

Roughly 60% of the market’s 10 best days land within two weeks of its 10 worst days. They are neighbors. Volatility clusters.

In 2008, some of the biggest single-day gains in history happened while the financial system looked like it was falling apart.

In March 2020, with the world in lockdown and nobody sure what came next, the market delivered some of its strongest days on record.

In April 2025, the market went through a V-shaped rally after collapsing on tariff headlines.

In summary, if you wait for the dust to settle, you’ve already missed the rebound. By the time the news feels safe again, the 10 best days are behind you.

What you actually control

The decision to sell may well be a good de-risking plan. Maybe the plan is to move to cash now, and come back once inflation cools, or once the election is done, or once you feel better about staying invested. But what if it’s just a guess, somehow dressed up in a suit?

Ideally you want to come back when the bottom is in. But the market doesn’t give you a heads up when the bottom arrives.

The best days show up while capitulation is in the air, and the headlines are still ugly, which is the whole reason people miss them.

Staying invested is of course a question of optimism, but, importantly, it is what keeps you in your seat.

Because the cost of leaving your seat, for what feels like a good reason, could be more than half your wealth. 0.2% of the days do over 50% of the work. You want to be there when they show up.

That’s it. Just show up.

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When the RMS Titanic set sail in 1912, it was a marvel of modern engineering.

It had it all: grand staircases, a heated swimming pool, squash courts, and even a Turkish bath. And yet, for all that engineering, the builders made a fatal call when they prioritized flashy features over boring safety.

To maximize deck space for first-class passengers, they fitted the ship with only 20 lifeboats, enough room for just half the 2,224 people on board.

Their bet was that any trouble would be minor, and anyway another ship would be close enough to help. Why wouldn’t it?

Pouring every spare dollar into the stock market without an emergency fund first is the Titanic without lifeboats.

I hear you. Yes, the fund is boring, and it’s taking up space where exciting investments could go. But when the iceberg hits, it’s that unexciting vehicle that keeps you afloat.

Don’t underestimate the iceberg

Often, it’s so easy to assume emergencies are something that happens mainly to other people. It makes some sense as investing is an optimist’s game. But the reality is that emergencies are not that rare.

• 37% of American adults can’t cover a $400 emergency with cash.

• When something breaks, 10% of working adults raid their retirement accounts.

With no backup plan in hand, here is what tends to happen when things go wrong:

The first instinct is usually to use the credit card. This is a painful move as stocks return about 10% a year while credit card interest runs about 24%. The moment you fund an emergency with debt, you’re paying more in interest than your portfolio could earn. It’s so hard to out-invest a credit card.

Option two is to sell your investments. But if you do so during a downturn, a paper loss becomes a real one. Not great.

The nuclear option is withdrawing from your traditional retirement account, which is next-level with the 10% penalty plus tax.

And let’s not forget about the hidden psychological cost. Without a plan B, investors are likely to panic more when markets dip, and shaky hands are more inclined to lock in the losses.

How big a lifeboat?

First, it’s important to remember that the fund needs to be built on your survival number, not your income.

A good starting point is to strip your budget down to what would keep you afloat if your paycheck vanished tomorrow.

Overall, aim for three to six months of your survival number. When in doubt, go with six.

How to actually build it?

If your employer matches 401(k) contributions, take the match while you’re building the fund. A 100% guaranteed return is unbeatable. Then start building as follows:

Now, where to park it?

Let me tell you first where not to park the emergency money.

Don’t leave it in checking… because you might be tempted to spend it.

Don’t leave it in a regular savings account… because it doesn’t earn much.

Put it instead in a High-Yield Savings Account. If possible at an online bank with competitive rates. Take some time shopping around, looking for the best option that works for you.

That’s it. Get your lifeboat.

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Many people ask, “What will my money become if I invest it?” That’s a great question, but I feel there’s a better one. The reverse: “How much do I need to invest each month, starting today, to get where I want to go?”

While the first question is passive, the second one puts you straight in the driver’s seat. It changes the whole perspective, and it gives you a sense of control and an appetite for action.

Get Into The Driver’s Seat

Let’s head to the SEC’s Savings Goal Calculator on investor.gov.

Just open it in a new tab and follow along.

We need three things: your target, your timeline, and a reasonable expected return.

The form looks like this:

For the expected return, you can start by plugging in 7% as the expected annual return. This is roughly what the S&P 500 has averaged over the past century (10%) adjusted by inflation to reflect your future purchasing power.

However, we need to think about fees and taxes. Our 7% real returns assumes you are using low-cost index funds. If you’re paying a 1% fee, we need to drop that number to 6%, or contemplate making a change.

It sounds like a small difference, but over 30 years, that 1% fee can eat nearly a fifth of the final prize.

Now how do we deal with taxes in our math? It depends on the vehicle that is used to invest (tax-free, deferred tax, taxable, etc.).

To keep it simple we stick with 7% in our illustration assuming this is within a tax-free retirement account.

Getting to $1 Million

Right. Here’s what reaching $1,000,000 by age 65 costs, starting from zero, at 7%:

The key takeaway here is that time is your most valuable asset. The more years you give your money to grow, the less heavy lifting you have to do with your own paycheck.

If you are starting later in the game, the numbers can look daunting, but don’t let them discourage you! You likely have other advantages such as entering your peak earning years, or having the option to use ‘catch-up contributions’ in retirement accounts.

Even a small shift, like extending your goal age a bit or automating an extra contribution, can drastically change your destination.

How to Find Your Number

The above uses $1 million figure as an illustration only. Now, let’s find your number.

Here’s our roadmap in three steps.

Step 1: Define Your Income Gap

How much annual income do you want when you retire? Let’s say $80,000. Subtract any guaranteed income, like Social Security, a pension, or equivalent. For instance, if Social Security covers $30,000, your gap is $50,000.

Step 2: Find Your Freedom Number

Multiply that income gap by 25. So $50,000 × 25 = $1,250,000. This comes from the Rule of 25, which is the flip side of the 4% rule from the Trinity Study. The research showed that a portfolio that size can sustainably support 4% annual withdrawals over a 30-year retirement. Like any rule of thumb, it’s not perfect. Early retirees planning for 40+ years should be more conservative. But it’s a solid starting framework.

Step 3: Make a Plan

Come back to the SEC calculator. Enter your Freedom Number as the savings goal. Enter your current age and how many years until retirement. Drop in whatever you’ve already got saved as the initial amount. Set the expected return, and hit calculate.

That’s your monthly number.

Once you have your number, you can argue with it. Maybe you push retirement back a year, trim the target, automate an extra $200 a month, or think about your tax arrangement in the long run. Pick one, or more. All of it beats the alternative, which is missing the compounding train.

That’s it. Now you have a plan.

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The New York Stock Exchange opened in 1792.

A group of brokers and merchants signed an agreement under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street. Nobody there was thinking about ordinary investors.

They traded war bonds from Alexander Hamilton, stock in the Bank of New York, and shares in a few insurance companies.

Their market served governments, banks, and wealthy merchants as they were the key people who traded securities back then.

That’s pretty much how it all started.

Everything built since then including the instruments, the language, the regulations, the products, and so on was built on that foundation. Layer by layer, decade by decade.

The list of products is forever-expanding. Bonds, then derivatives, then mutual funds, then ETFs, then options on ETFs, then structured products with a diabolical level of complexity.

Each layer solved a problem, and addressed a new need. But, rarely for a regular person trying to set aside $100 a month.

Over two centuries later, the industry language now reflects this.

You hear vocabulary like sharpe ratio, duration risk, yield curve inversion, or a long list of Greek letters like Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. None of these terms were built to explain anything to retail investors.

They evolved inside institutions talking to other institutions, and they stuck.

They became the vocabulary of the whole industry, including the parts aimed at you.

So if you’ve ever sat down to figure out where to put your money and felt out of your depth, that was a rational response to a genuinely confusing system.

Yet, the same markets that were never designed for ordinary people have quietly made ordinary people wealthy more consistently, and more simply, than almost any other path open to them.

A handful of timeless principles, applied patiently, work regardless of who sits at the table.

So, no, the stock market was not built for you.
But it’s available to you.
And that is all you need.

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Welcome to The No-Fuss Investor

You’ve found a new publication. Thank you for being here this early.

A new article will go out weekly on practical investing for everyday investors.

The questions most people ask about investing are simple.

• What to buy? When to buy? How much?

• What to sell? When to sell? How much?

And so are the answers, once you strip away the noise.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, everyone says investing is simple. Every personal finance writer, index fund evangelist, and Substack with “wealth” in the name. It’s the most repeated claim in the genre.

I am with you. I’ve heard it for years, too. Somehow, I thought I had absorbed it all because it made perfect sense. But as it turns out, hearing about it and actually going through it are not the same thing.

I worked in the world of finance for twenty years. I saw the crashes, the rallies, and the long stretches in between. The one thing that surprised me most is how little of what matters is complicated.

The principles that grow wealth are mostly no-fuss common sense, applied patiently. They are available to me, and they are available to you.

That is what this publication is about.

What this will do for you

• If you haven’t started investing yet, I hope this will help you begin.

• If you’ve started but feel lost or rattled, I hope this will help you steady yourself.

• If you’re invested and curious, I hope this will give you more to work with.

Wherever you are on your investing journey, this is built for you.

If that sounds useful, subscribe and the next article will land in your inbox.

Welcome to the No-Fuss Investor.

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This publication is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or tax advice.