This guest post is by Wilfred Brockmann, our Chief Investment Officer.
I want to tell you something that might sound counterintuitive: The moment you feel most compelled to do something with your portfolio is usually the exact moment you should do nothing at all.
We’re wired all wrong for this game. Every instinct we have screams at us to act when markets get choppy. Do something. Anything. Move to cash. Rotate sectors. Hedge your positions. The financial media amplifies this urge with breathless coverage of every market swing, and suddenly sitting still feels like negligence. But here’s what I’ve learned after four decades in this business: The investors who win are not the ones who act the most. They’re the ones who follow their rules when it hurts the most to do so.
Think about what happens when markets turn volatile. You turn on the television or your portfolio statement arrives, and those red numbers trigger something primal in your brain. Fear floods your system. You start questioning everything. Maybe your allocation is wrong. Maybe you should have seen this coming. Maybe you need to protect what you have left before it gets worse.
Logic over Biology?
This is your biology talking, not your logic. We evolved to respond to threats with immediate action. That worked great when the threat was a predator in the grass. It works terribly when the threat is market volatility. The paradox is that the plan you made when you were calm and rational becomes hardest to follow precisely when you need it most. When everything feels uncertain, abandoning your strategy feels like taking control. But you’re not taking control. You’re surrendering to fear.
I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself through every market cycle. Smart people, successful people, disciplined people—they all feel the same pull to react. The difference between those who build wealth over time and those who don’t comes down to one thing: whether they follow their rules or follow their feelings. Your plan was built for moments like these. You didn’t create your investment strategy during calm markets because you thought markets would stay calm forever. You built it specifically to carry you through periods when clarity disappears and emotion takes over. The plan is your anchor when everything else is moving. Let me be clear about something. I’m not suggesting blind faith in any strategy regardless of changed circumstances. If your life situation has fundamentally changed, if your time horizon has shifted, if your risk tolerance has genuinely evolved beyond temporary discomfort, then yes, adjustments make sense. But that’s different from reacting to market movements.
The question you need to ask yourself is this: Has anything about my situation actually changed, or am I just uncomfortable with volatility? Discomfort is not a reason to abandon a sound strategy. Discomfort is the price of admission for earning returns above what you’d get in a savings account. If investing were comfortable all the time, everyone would do it successfully and there would be no premium for taking risk. I think about the investors who sold during March of 2020 when the world felt like it was ending. They felt certain they were protecting themselves. They felt smart for getting out before it got worse. Then the market recovered faster than almost anyone predicted, and those same investors faced an agonizing decision: buy back in at higher prices or stay in cash and watch from the sidelines. Or go back further to 2008 and 2009. The investors who stuck to their discipline, who kept buying when it felt insane to do so, who followed their rules instead of their fear—those are the people who recovered and thrived. The ones who bailed out are often still trying to make up lost ground.
Following your rules doesn’t guarantee you’ll be comfortable. It guarantees you’ll be consistent. And consistency, boring as it sounds, is what compounds over time into real wealth. This is where discipline separates itself from intelligence. You can be the smartest person in the room, but if you can’t stick to your plan when markets test you, that intelligence works against you. You’ll find sophisticated reasons to justify emotional decisions. The rules you set for yourself are not suggestions. They’re not guidelines to follow when convenient. They’re the framework that removes decision-making from your emotional brain and puts it back in your rational one.
When volatility hits, I go back to my rules. Not because I lack opinions about what might happen next. I have plenty of opinions. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know my opinions about short-term market movements are worth about as much as anyone else’s, which is to say, not much. What I can control is whether I follow my process. Whether I stick to my asset allocation. Whether I keep contributing regardless of whether it feels like a good time or a terrible time. Your plan is either sound or it’s not. If it’s sound, follow it. If it’s not sound, fix it during calm periods, not during storms. The future will always be uncertain. Markets will always cycle through periods that test your resolve. The investors who survive and thrive aren’t the ones with perfect market timing. They’re the ones who built a plan they could stick to and then proved they could actually stick to it when everything in them wanted to run.
Follow your rules. That way you can let your discipline do what emotion never will—build wealth over time.