The Woodward Financial Advisors Blog

These days, reading a newspaper feels like looking into some alternate reality where things make very little sense. When you take rising COVID-19 cases with a level of social unrest we haven’t seen for half a century, and top if off with shockingly bad economic news, you get a pretty universally ugly picture. Although we’ve never had an economic and public health crisis exactly like this, it doesn’t mean we can’t look to history to help us answer a few key questions.

To be clear, we don’t expect folks to react indifferently to the political and ideological roller coaster that is an election year. We simply caution letting those viewpoints infiltrate your investment decision-making process. Time has shown this to be a losing strategy.

Both the ancient Greeks and modern behavioral scientists seem to agree that one of the paths to greater happiness could be to just not look.

Descriptions of the long-term behavior of the stock market can seem a lot like shampoo instructions: the market goes up, followed by a drop, then it goes back up again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

But unbeknownst to her, my daughter gave me the best Father’s Day present that any financial advisor could ask for, when, upon glancing at the back of the Business section of the newspaper that I was reading, she asked, “Daddy, what are all those funny looking charts?”

I know there will be some great times and some terrible times and I’ll just keep rolling as long as you let me.