I spent this past weekend doing what my family does most weekends — shuttling our kids around to their various games, practices and birthday parties.
One of the best parts about having young children is so much of your time is devoted to their activities that you don’t have a lot of time to pay attention to the outside world. Some parents complain about being busy all the time but I find it to be a welcomed break from paying attention to all of the craziness this world has to offer.
Having said that, I would be lying if I said there was no checking in on what everyone in the finance sphere was saying about the unprecedented tariffs announced by the U.S. late last week. I consumed all of the tariff content and analysis I could get my hands on.1
This is a potentially huge story for the economy and markets. People were freaking out because this could have enormous implications for trade, currencies, inflation and the global economy.
If social media sentiment translated into market moves we would have seen a 1987-like crash on Monday. You had crypto prices crashing, equity futures falling, currencies moving and tons of speculation on what it all means.
I don’t know what it all means. No one does because we have no idea how long these tariffs will last or how punitive they will be.
Investing would be a lot easier if there were no uncertainty. If someone could just kindly tell you where all of the landmines are buried ahead of time, you could side them completely and go on with your life.
Life doesn’t work like that, unfortunately. Uncertainty is always at all-time highs because no one knows what’s coming next. The hard part is there is this human need for control in life, even if that control is an illusion.
You have no control over what happens with taxes, trade, tariffs, the Fed, interest rates, economic growth, inflation, earnings or stock market returns. None. So it’s really your reaction to the uncontrollable events that determines your success or failure as an investor.
I’ve read plenty of books about the moon mission and our space race with Russia in the 1960s.2
The common theme across the Apollo missions was the sheer amount of planning involved. There were months and months of simulations and training exercises to review every possible scenario. They wanted every process to be automatic.
But there was always the risk of an unplanned error, considering they were propelling these giant hunks of metal through space using rocket fuel that would allow them to reach speeds of more than 24,000 miles per hour.
You couldn’t possibly plan for everything with all the unknowns up there. When something went seriously wrong it was usually unexpected — something no one could have planned for in a million years of training.
When Apollo 13 had an explosion mid-flight, it wasn’t something anyone thought could have been even a remote possibility. Astronaut Jack Swigert3 explained it after the fact like this:
Nobody thought the spacecraft would lose two fuel cells and two oxygen tanks. It couldn’t happen. If somebody had thrown that at us in the simulator, we’d have said, ‘Come on, you’re not being realistic.’
This is why NASA trained the astronauts in one skill more than any other leading up to their space flights — the art of not panicking. The only reason they could turn the Apollo 13 spacecraft around 200,000 miles from earth following an explosion onboard is because the astronauts and everyone on the ground remained levelheaded. No one freaked out.
Or if they were freaking out internally, they didn’t act on those emotions.
In a nutshell, that is successful investing.
The media is going to overreact.
Politicians are going to overreact.
People on social media are going to overreact.
Your co-workers are going to overreact.
I know it’s easy to freak out when you see scary or uncertain headlines but freaking out is not a strategy.
It never is.
Further Reading:
Rocket Men Precision
1Two of the best primers on the impact of tariffs here and here.
2The latest one I read last year was Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed.
3Played by Kevin Bacon in the movie.