It's Been Good for Us Investors... Don't Lose Sight of That Fact
July 18, 2026
From January 2023 through the end of June this year, a period of 42 months, the US stock markets have roughly doubled in value. Put another way, markets have increased in value by over $34 trillion dollars. If you want to do the math, that’s a 1 with 12 zeros following…times 34. A tremendous increase in wealth.
This abundance has not gone evenly distributed. Too many people live paycheck to paycheck, without adequate, if any health insurance. The repercussions of this inequality are only beginning to emerge but that is a topic for another time. Many institutions and people, including most of you reading this, have benefitted greatly. I bring it up because I believe it will be useful to take stock (ha!) of where we’ve come from.
The constant dramatic surges and drops in single stock share prices is unprecedented. In the last 18 months especially, earnings growth, AI mania, and greater retail participation has fueled dramatic price action. Companies gaining and shedding billions, and even tens of billions, of dollars in value in a single day. Even long-established blue-chp companies like Goldman Sachs and Caterpillar traded like tech stocks, reaching valuations way beyond their historical averages. It has been easy to be caught offsides, buying during a frenzy, selling out of fear. Recency bias is powerful.
Reminding yourself about how well your investments have done should help keep you calm, think clearly, and have useful, not emotional, conversations with your advisors. If you, or they, made a mistake, let it go. Holding onto an investment because you hope the shares will rise back to where they were, and not because the company has a fundamentally sound business that is growing and reasonably valued, is not a good strategy. The past is the past, don't hang on with hope, jettison your mistakes, take a clear-eyed look at what you own. The markets will go down again, regroup, rise. You want to own the companies that will have favorable prospects when that happens. Resist the tendency to overreact to recent market activity. In the heat of the moment, or in the depths of a despair over a stock/ETF not bought or sold, one can easily lose sight of the bigger picture. Take comfort from that and don't do anything rash.
Switching gears.
In October 2024 I was bitten by a lone star tick and, unfortunately, contracted alpha gal syndrome, making me allergic to all mammal meat. (For some whose allergic reactions are stronger, all dairy is also off the menu. Reactions can even be fatal.) At the time, it was not that well known, understood even less. Though not exactly rare in Montauk where I spend lots of time, many people, including a surprisingly large number of physicians, had never heard of it. Times have changed. Tick-borne illnesses are much more common and of much greater concern. The link below is to an article from a recent NY Times article that provides lots of information on the situation. The insects are coming – be informed. [Fyi, my most recent blood test showed that the red meat allergy titers in my blood had significantly declined. Of course that was after the winter. We’ll see how it reads after the warmer months in deer-infested Montauk.]