There’s a saying that every saint has a past. It resonates when reflecting on professional growth especially in investing, where theory often collides with emotion. Wisdom can be taught, but it carries a different weight once it’s lived. Most people trust guidance more when it’s shaped by experience rather than abstraction.
One of the most common missteps advisors face is the desire to be a hero. When markets feel fragile and pessimism dominates headlines, investors naturally want certainty. They want reassurance that someone can see what’s coming and act decisively. But, when markets appear vulnerable, the disciplined response is often patience. History shows that things usually don’t turn out as badly as feared. Yet if markets continue to fall, that guidance can feel wrong in hindsight, creating frustration or second-guessing. This emotional tension is precisely why investing is so difficult and why heroic decision-making often leads to worse outcomes.
Successful investing reinforces a principle long understood by thoughtful investors: don’t try to time every move of the market, and don’t let fear or greed dictate decisions. Stepping out of the market due to pessimism often leads to lower returns, not better ones. Markets have a long history of proving pessimists wrong. Even when pessimists are eventually right, they’re often early and the cost of being wrong along the way can outweigh the benefit of being right later.
Today, anxiety feels pervasive. Rising debt, persistent money printing, AI replacing large swaths of the labor force are fueling concerns that the system is fragile. No one knows how this ultimately unfolds. This is where discipline matters most. The most important role in investing, whether self-directed or guided, is having a steady voice of reason. Someone, or something, that helps prevent decisions that feel good in the moment but quietly undermine long-term goals.
Our CEO, Ron Finke, uses an analogy I’ve always enjoyed: He suggests you can think of the market as the factory machine, the advisor and client as the manager, and wisdom as the dog. The factory runs just fine if left alone. The dog’s role in the story is to bite the manager’s hand anytime they try to shut the factory down.
Nearly every experienced investor has spent time speculating, timing markets, and learning lessons the hard way. Those successes and failures alike shape real understanding, and humility, around what works and what doesn’t. Discipline does not mean passivity; it means applying experience-earned restraint, respecting long-term evidence, and understanding the difference between thoughtful action and reactive behavior.
In investing, progress often comes not from predicting the future, but from learning when not to get in your own way.
(Past performance is no guarantee of future results. The advice is general in nature and not intended for specific situations)