The stock market has fallen by about 6% over the last month. The war in the Middle East has driven up the price of oil and created global economic uncertainty.
The chart below shows the price trends for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq over the last month and since the end of October 2025.
Prices were basically flat from the end of October until the end of February. You can see the drop in prices over the last few weeks. The Nasdaq has dropped slightly more than the S&P 500.
Where prices go from here is totally dependent upon the situation in Iran.
In the last few days, the stock market has inched higher. The market is currently optimistic that the war will be ending soon and that oil prices will retreat.
The situation is very volatile, and the market is responding daily to the headlines.
The underlying economic drivers beyond the war remain. Economic data continues to be mixed. Employment data has been volatile – good one month and bad the next. Inflation continues to run above the Fed’s goal of 2% but it has been stable. If oil prices remain high, inflation will increase.
At this point, all we can do is hope for a fast and peaceful resolution to the war in Iran. Those of you who invest with my system can take comfort that your savings will be protected if things get ugly.
Stay Disciplined My Friends,
Phil
Disclaimers The Beyond Buy & Hold newsletter is published and provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. We are not advising, and will not advise you personally, concerning the nature, potential, value, or suitability of any particular security, portfolio of securities, transaction, investment strategy or other matter. Beyond Buy & Hold recommends you consult a licensed or registered professional before making any investment decision.
Investing in the financial products discussed in the Newsletter involves risk. Trading in such securities can result in immediate and substantial losses of the capital invested. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Actual results will vary widely given a variety of factors such as experience, skill, risk mitigation practices, and market dynamics.
I’ve worked with hundreds of investors on their retirement plans. People approach investing in every possible way.
I see conservative investors. I see aggressive investors. I see moderate investors. I see speculative investors. I see confident investors. I see anxious investors.
I see investors who are primarily focused on taxes. I see investors whose focus is capital preservation – avoiding losses. I see aggressive investors who are totally comfortable suffering short-term losses and riding out market downturns.
I see investors who are drawn to exotic and complex investing approaches – options, alternative investments, commodities, etc. I see investors who are big proponents of bonds and others who hate bonds. I see investors who think they can beat the market by picking individual stocks and others who only buy ETFs.
I see investors who depend on financial advisors and others who never use advisors.
Everyone has their own approach to investing. This is a good thing. We value different things and we want different things from our investments.
I am always curious, though, as to how people arrive at their investing style or strategy. I try to understand the beliefs and the information people use to choose their approach. As you might imagine, the reasons are all over the map.
The biggest weakness I see is that most people are not strategic about their investing approach. They take one or two pieces of information and base everything they do on a limited view of the investing world.
To illustrate my point, I would like to briefly review the classic strategic planning process used in business and other fields.
Good strategic planning processes involve data gathering and analysis, goal setting, the creation of action plans and an ongoing assessment and measurement process.
Goals Setting
Everything starts with your goals. Goals should be as specific as possible. Goals should be realistic. Goals should be measurable.
Strategy developed from a comprehensive review of the marketplace.
A solid strategy supported by data and analysis to achieve your goals
Understanding keys to success – what works and what doesn’t
Intimate knowledge of the market – real world experience
Action plans to support the execution of the goals.
Prioritized activities to achieve your goals
Milestones and assessments
Measuring progress and making adjustments if necessary
Another key component of a good strategic planning process is testing. Even the best plans contain risks and uncertainties. There are always ways to test ideas in a small way to prove or disprove a hypothesis.
The investing world, like the business world, is complex and dynamic. Successful businesses and successful investors cut through the complexity.
Many, if not most, of the investors I come across DO NOT follow a disciplined strategic process to arrive at their financial plans. The biggest shortcoming is typically a lack of a thorough analysis of the investing market. Most investors are missing key pieces of information that leads to a less effective strategy.
The other major weakness is the lack of a thorough and complete assessment and review process. Because many investors are missing key data about investing, they cannot make the proper evaluation of their results. They don’t know what to compare their results to or how to properly assess their performance.
It is also common for me to come across investors who stick with one and only one investment strategy. In many cases, people should be deploying multiple investment strategies. One strategy might make sense for tax deferred accounts and another for taxable investment accounts, for example.
If you are uncertain about which investment strategy to deploy (most people are), you should be testing multiple strategies. You can get the answers for yourself.
The investing world is confusing and most of the experts make it more confusing. You are not alone if you struggle with this.
My mission is to cut through the noise for my clients. I have done the research and the work to be able to simplify the investing process – to share the data about what works and what doesn’t work.
But I can’t create your goals. You must do that for yourself. And you can’t figure out your ideal investing strategy without creating some goals – both objective and subjective.
Your goals come from what you need from your investments (income, returns, etc.) and what you want (safety, growth, risk, etc.).
If you need to draw heavily from your retirement accounts to meet living costs in retirement, the process is more straightforward. In this case, the strategy becomes very numbers driven. If you only need to earn 5% per year from your retirement investments, you have a variety of options available to you. If you need to make 6.5% per year to generate enough income in retirement, that leads to another set of options.
Many of the people I work with do not need to withdraw much from their retirement accounts to meet their living expenses in retirement. Some have enough income from other sources (pensions, Social Security, annuities, etc.) that they don’t need to rely on any money from their retirement accounts.
If people don’t need to touch their retirement accounts, the goals for those accounts are a little less straightforward. These investors need to decide what will happen to the money when they die. Who will inherit the funds? Will it be children? Charitable causes?
Do you want to maximize the money that you pass along? Do you want to avoid potential losses and keep the money safe? If no one is depending on that money, do you want to invest it aggressively? Do you want to simply minimize taxes?
The most important thing in coming up with the appropriate investment strategy is figuring out what you want. The best way to do that is to ask yourself a series of questions. What scenarios would make you happy? What scenarios would make you upset? Describe your ideal situation in 10 years, 20 years, etc.
Once you know what you want, the strategy flows from there. The key is to have the strategy and the goals aligned. In many situations I encounter, they are not aligned.
Every investment you own should line up with your strategy. Owning something just because you think it is a good investment is not good enough. You should understand every investment that you own and you should have a reason for owning it.
If you are strategic about your investing, you can be more disciplined and you can keep emotions out of the process. If you are not strategic, you will end up relying on luck. Luck is not a strategy.
If you need help with goal setting or strategy development for your investing, you can book a quick call with me using the link below. Talking this through with someone else can help you figure this out.
You can book time on my calendar by Clicking Here.
Stay Disciplined My Friends,
Phil
Disclaimers The Beyond Buy & Hold newsletter is published and provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. We are not advising, and will not advise you personally, concerning the nature, potential, value, or suitability of any particular security, portfolio of securities, transaction, investment strategy or other matter. Beyond Buy & Hold recommends you consult a licensed or registered professional before making any investment decision.
Investing in the financial products discussed in the Newsletter involves risk. Trading in such securities can result in immediate and substantial losses of the capital invested. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Actual results will vary widely given a variety of factors such as experience, skill, risk mitigation practices, and market dynamics.
People with the wrong attitudes and behaviors about investing end up with poor results. They get caught up in the confusion and misinformation and end up making bad decisions or no decisions. Unfortunately, based on my experience working with thousands of investors, just about everyone suffers from one or more of these shortcomings to some degree.
People believe that investing is much more complicated than it really is.
It is completely understandable. The investment industry creates most of this confusion. They want you to be confused so that you need their services.
There is a lot of complexity in the investing world, but the best investors cut through all the noise. They simplify things and focus on what really matters. As a result, they generate better investing results.
The Indecisive Investor
There are two types of indecisive investors.
The first kind ends up making too many changes to their investment strategy. They make too many decisions and constantly move from one strategy to the next. They can’t commit to any one or two strategies, and they overreact to short term results. They lack the confidence and the experience to carefully and judiciously pick a strategy and stick with it.
In most cases, fear is driving the indecision. They are afraid they picked the wrong strategy, or they are afraid they are missing a better strategy somewhere out there.
The other type of Indecisive Investor can’t make any changes to their investment strategy no matter how bad it is. Decision paralysis is a common trait of many investors. These investors get overwhelmed by all the information and they become too scared to make a change. They worry about taxes when they should be worrying about net returns after taxes.
I recently worked with an investor who had a financial advisor that was charging them 1% per year. This advisor only generated a return of 3% in 2025 – a year when the S&P 500 gained 17.9%. This investor only ended up with 2% returns after fees. But they were still working with this advisor. They were stuck.
Investors who procrastinate fall into the category of Indecisive Investors. Investors who procrastinate know that they should be making a change, but they can’t get themselves to do anything about it. They look at anything new or different as too risky even though their current strategy is costing them dearly. They are afraid of change.
Education and experience are critical to get Indecisive Investors moving in a better direction. There are a few simple things that every investor needs to know to become a better investor. We’ll cover some of them below but next we will review some of the other problem behaviors.
The Stubborn Investor
Stubborn investors also have trouble exploring better options, but it is not because of indecision. The stubborn investor has made a conscious decision to live and die by their current strategy even though it may be flawed.
The stubborn investor usually has latched on to a key truth about investing and they stick to it. This can be admirable when it involves a thorough review of all the options and of the weaknesses in their current strategy.
A common example of stubborn investors that I come across is the investor that is fully committed to the stock market at all times even when they reach retirement age. This kind of investor learned that the stock market generates the best returns in the long run. They know that stocks can fall significantly in a bear market but that they always regain those losses even if it takes several years.
Both of these key principles are true.
What they miss is the fact that a bear market in retirement can destroy their retirement plans. Older investors don’t have the luxury of time that is afforded to younger investors.
They also miss the fact that they can get the benefit of high returns from the stock market in good times and avoid the painful losses in bad times.
The stubborn investor has some of the information they need to know but they stop learning at a certain point. Part of this may be due to age. I am more stubborn now that I am older. But I like to think I am not so stubborn as to avoid new information that can help me make better decisions.
The Overconfident Investor
The last category of ineffective investors that I will review today is the Overconfident Investor.
Professional and experience investors have been humbled many times by the financial markets. I bear the scars that come with decades of investing experience.
I used to believe that I could beat the market by buying individual stocks. I learned the hard way what the research studies have proven – that less than 1% of all investors (professional and amateur) can manage an individual stock portfolio and beat the S&P 500 index in the long run.
I come across lots of stock pickers in my work who haven’t figured this out yet. Some are financial advisors and some are individual investors. The advisors are often aware of the futility of stock picking, but they do so because it is a way to justify their fees. If they simply purchased an S&P 500 index fund, their clients would balk at paying them a 1% fee every year for something they could do on their own.
Other Overconfident Investors study up on stock options and think that they can beat the market this way. Stock options are incredibly complex, and fewer people can successfully deploy an options strategy than can be successful stock pickers.
Day traders also fall into the category of the Overconfident Investor. Like the people who visit casinos, day traders will tell you all about their big wins, but you seldom hear about their bad bets. I always tell people who are day traders to look at the list of the world’s richest people and see how many day traders are on that list. Ninety percent of day traders lose money.
I come across other Overconfident Investors who have developed their own unique investing strategy that they fully believe in. When I ask them if they have back tested their strategy in different market cycles, I get blank stares. I applaud these explorers for their effort and their creativity but generating above market returns is quite another thing.
The Best Investors
The Best investors do two things:
They have done their homework, and they invest in the best funds.
They have a proven and effective strategy to avoid major losses in stock market downturns.
The Best Funds
The data is readily available to find the funds to invest in. To summarize:
Stock funds beat all other funds in the long run.
Large cap funds beat small cap funds.
US funds beat international funds.
Index funds representing the Nasdaq-100 and the S&P 500 generate annual returns of 10% per year or more and should be at the top of your list.
Bonds are lousy investments – generating annual returns of 3% to 4% and lose money when interest rates climb.
Avoiding Losses
I looked at all the similar funds and have yet to find one that is as effective as my Growth & Safety fund at avoiding losses in bear markets while also capturing the large gains of the stock market in bull markets. Some are good at avoiding losses but not so good at generating high returns in good times. Other capture high returns in bull markets but are not very effective at limiting losses in bear markets.
My Growth & Safety investing system provides the best of both worlds – high returns from the best index funds in good times and much smaller losses in bear declines.
When you have the right investment strategy that generates high returns in growth markets and protects your savings in down markets, you can be very decisive and very confident. You no longer need to worry about investing.
If you want to become one of the best investors on the planet, you should set up an appointment by clicking the link below to find out how to start investing in my Growth & Safety mutual fund. Don’t be a procrastinator or an Indecisive Investor. Act now.
You can book time on my calendar to learn more by Clicking Here.
Stay Disciplined My Friends,
Phil
Disclaimers The Beyond Buy & Hold newsletter is published and provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. We are not advising, and will not advise you personally, concerning the nature, potential, value, or suitability of any particular security, portfolio of securities, transaction, investment strategy or other matter. Beyond Buy & Hold recommends you consult a licensed or registered professional before making any investment decision.
Investing in the financial products discussed in the Newsletter involves risk. Trading in such securities can result in immediate and substantial losses of the capital invested. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Actual results will vary widely given a variety of factors such as experience, skill, risk mitigation practices, and market dynamics.
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