April 7, 2025

I’d imagine by the time you’re reading this you will probably already have studied what’s happening in your history classes. You’ll have the benefit of hindsight when you do, living through it is a different matter.

President Trump started what the press is calling a trade war by launching global tariffs on other countries. I am not educated enough to posit an opinion on if this is a good thing, or a reckless thing (which is part of the point) but what do know is what the global stock markets are doing in result.

Massive panic based selling has hit every exchange and index across the world. Individual stocks with high exposure have been hammered. And while countries are starting to signal impending capitulation we’re not there yet.

To personalize things, my brokerage account has lost ~10% of it’s value in the last 5 days. I’m sure we’ve got farther to go before the bottom is found. Both of these are pretty scary thoughts when you think about it. I completely understand the urge to sell when markets are crashing. So what am I doing about it?

Absolutely nothing. Why? Because I can’t answer these two questions:

In fact nobody can. There’s smart people making educated guesses, and when they’re right are making a ton of money. But on the other side of that trade are people who’ve guessed wrong and lost everything.

What I can share is how common Black Swans have been in my adult lifetime. Just looking at “crashes” of 20% or more since I graduated High School there’s been four (probably five after this week is done):

This doesn’t account for all of the other economic calamities I’ve seen along the way (every writers/actors strike devastates LA).

Back to the question on what to do about it. In my case I made peace with this years ago during Covid. What happens with the stock market day to day doesn’t matter to me. It matters where the stock market is 20 years from now, and if I was convinced the answer is lower then we’re living in the wrong country.

I’ll explain more on how I got to this point in the future. But for now I want to leave you with some graphs I pulled this morning. Depending on where you’re looking changes how you feel about what’s going on.