Sep 18, 2026 · 6 min · 6 segments
Market headlines screaming? Portfolio bouncing around? Before you make a move you might regret, take four minutes and hear why the smartest thing you can do with your investments might be... nothing…
Douglas GoldsteinHostA couple sat down with me for a portfolio review recently, and they had a list of questions a mile long.
Should they dump tech stocks, move into commodities, put everything in the bank? Their portfolios were diversified, their income was stable, and they didn't need cash anytime soon.
Has anything actually changed in your life, or are you just six months older? The answer was no.
I'm Doug Goldstein and today we're talking about why short-term market noise can drown out your long-term strategy and what to do about it.
Wars, elections, economic slowdowns, they all grab your attention and make it seem like you need to act right now.
But a portfolio that's designed for 10 or 20 years shouldn't be managed based on what happens in 10 or 20 days.
If you planted a tree in your backyard, you wouldn't dig it up every time the weather changed.
Over almost any 10-year period in stock market history, the returns have been positive.
To be clear, historically, the S&P 500, including reinvested dividends, produced a positive return in roughly 94% of rolling 10-year calendar periods from 1928 through 2025.
That is reassuring, but of course, it does not guarantee that the next 10 years will be positive.
Anyway, the couple I mentioned, the tech companies they were worried about were actually posting record earnings.
Some stocks dipped after strong reports, not because of bad news, but because investors were impatient about future spending.
Impatience is not structural failure, and the major risk wasn't the market going down.
It was making a reactive decision that locked in a loss at exactly the wrong time.
A couple sat down with me for a portfolio review recently, and they had a list of questions a mile long.
Should they dump tech stocks, move into commodities, put everything in the bank? Their portfolios were diversified, their income was stable, and they didn't need cash anytime soon.
Has anything actually changed in your life, or are you just six months older? The answer was no.
I'm Doug Goldstein and today we're talking about why short-term market noise can drown out your long-term strategy and what to do about it.
Wars, elections, economic slowdowns, they all grab your attention and make it seem like you need to act right now.
But a portfolio that's designed for 10 or 20 years shouldn't be managed based on what happens in 10 or 20 days.
If you planted a tree in your backyard, you wouldn't dig it up every time the weather changed.
Over almost any 10-year period in stock market history, the returns have been positive.
To be clear, historically, the S&P 500, including reinvested dividends, produced a positive return in roughly 94% of rolling 10-year calendar periods from 1928 through 2025.
That is reassuring, but of course, it does not guarantee that the next 10 years will be positive.
Anyway, the couple I mentioned, the tech companies they were worried about were actually posting record earnings.
Some stocks dipped after strong reports, not because of bad news, but because investors were impatient about future spending.
Impatience is not structural failure, and the major risk wasn't the market going down.
It was making a reactive decision that locked in a loss at exactly the wrong time.
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