I started my Twitter account on the day the stock market bottomed in March of 2009 and all I ever told you from that day forward was to stay calm, remain invested, and think about the big picture.

I told you this every day. Multiple times a day. On Twitter, on The Reformed Broker wordpress blog, on CNBC, on other people’s podcasts, on YouTube, on stages all over the country and on the street corner if you stopped me for a selfie.

I wrote thousands of blog posts and articles on this topic. Literally daily. Thousands.

I adopted an investing philosophy, shared it as widely as I possibly could and built my entire life and career around it. Anyone can say whatever they want about me but they can’t say a goddamn thing about that.

Here’s what’s happened since that day:

I’m showing you the growth of a hypothetical $100,000 investment in each of the major indices since that time (total return). The Nasdaq Composite, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500. You can’t invest directly in an index but index funds get the job done. I show you this to illustrate the power of having a big idea and standing tall as an ocean of abuse, disrespect, derision and misplaced paranoia comes your way.

The Dow Jones traded as low as 6,500 in March of 2009 and today it’s over 42,000. The S&P 500 has 5X’d and the Nasdaq has more than sextupled (love that word).

You wouldn’t believe how many people have just spent the last fifteen years telling others to fade rallies, short the index, swing to cash, “manage risk”, fear volatility and disbelieve the premise that drawdowns are a normal and natural part of capturing the upside of the stock market.

And not only did they ridicule those who remained long during the corrections, they lied about the silver bullets and secret elixirs that would have “kept you safe”, if only you had been smart enough to take heed. They told of magical strategies by which one could never see a down day but consistently achieve record high portfolio values, if only we’d subscribe to their emails or turn our retirement accounts over to their funds. This was always bullshit on stilts. It just took awhile for this to have become apparent. Now it’s a punchline - did you hear the one about the washed up former hedge fund manager selling predictions to old men trading in their basements for ten bucks a month?

What’s even more astonishing is how many of them are still around, unapologetically showing their faces day after day in search of new know-nothings to trick and abuse. I’m convinced some of these people are not even in it for the money anymore, but for the revenge. Bitterness over a misspent career and lost opportunities will eat away at a man’s soul unto the point where making others feel their hurt becomes more important than pursuing their own happiness and satisfaction.

If you’ve met them, then you know. All that’s left is the rage and denial. They are always on the verge of vindication.

It’s very easy, in hindsight, to say that investing has been a snap - “Just look at the chart! It went up!” You had to be a part of the formation of this chart in order to have captured it. You had to ride it both ways, whether you wanted to or not. You had to accept that during each correction, you were holding more exposure than you had before the previous correction, owing to the accumulated gains from being in the game. You had to endure the siren song of the pessimists, imploring you to grab hold of a life raft and row away from risk to meet them on the shore.

Little did you know that the shore the naysayers stood upon, as they admonished the rest of us out on the waves, was already being eroded into the sea, washed away beneath their feet. What seemed safe years ago (low volatility, fully hedged portfolios) now seems wildly reckless after the passage of time and the growth of the stock market - the gains they’ve missed can never be made up for, and everything in the economy of 2024 costs significantly more than it once did. They chose low risk back then, which has meant high risk today and tomorrow. They had it backwards.

Many of us did not. We understood. This was never about minimizing volatility, it was about bearing the risk that others wouldn’t. That’s how the reward was earned. And here we are.

The most important thing I can tell you now, no matter what stage of the investing life cycle you are in, is to make a very simple decision:

Choose your influences carefully.

I chose mine carefully and it has made all the difference.

Don’t read shit that is being written to deliberately derail you or distract you from long-term success. Don’t become enamored of people offering short cuts, easy answers, hacks, tricks or unfulfillable “holy grail” promises of rewards without risk. Don’t trust systems or the people who say they possess them. Don’t chase, don’t lust after, don’t settle.

And above all, know the motivation of everyone speaking, and decide if that motivation works in your favor or against it. Because everything - literally everything - is incentives. Charlie Munger said “Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.” You and I haven’t seen 90 years worth of incentives at the highest levels of investing success the way Charlie has. We can take his word for it.

All I ever told you was to take more risk today so that tomorrow you could take less. For the people I said this to at the beginning, tomorrow is here. If you’re still with me, I’m proud of you.

We’re Number One

Guys, we have the number one investing book in America right now, three weeks straight. I say we because you’re a part of it and without you I have nothing. So our book is the best selling book in its category and it’s all because of you.

If you’ve haven’t gotten your copy yet, we’re still on the first edition, but not for long. Order it here.

And if you have gotten it, be sure to leave a review on Amazon.

The Cover

I’ve done more press in the last month than I have in the last three years. I’m going to dial it back now that the book has been launched but it has certainly been fun to reconnect with so many reporters, podcasters, hosts and columnists I haven’t been in touch with for awhile.

I did all the shows and all the publications. My PR rep Jimmy Moock and his team at StreetCred orchestrated everything beautifully. Not an easy feat but they’re really good at this stuff.

I even got the cover of one of my favorite industry magazines, Investment News:

This was really cool. There’s just something different about print, I can’t really put my finger on it but I like it.

Gregg Greenberg wrote the piece, you can read it online here:

No stopping the ‘Butcher of Park Avenue’

I appreciate all the publications and programs who covered the book this fall. It’s been a whirlwind!

The King and I

Here’s Bond King Bill Gross saying something nice about me. It’s a really good piece on the dawning mass realization that “it’s a bull market” as we’ve been talking about above.

Check it out at WilliamHGross.com 

Ads Gone Wild

This past week financial planners have been losing their minds over the new advertisements from the CFP Board. I grabbed Michael Kitces for a quick breakdown about what’s going on and why it matters for our new channel for financial advisors, The Unlock.

Watch it below:

Okay, that’s it from me today, thanks for checking out the site, talk soon! - Josh