Timing the Market

A common question I receive is "is now a good time to invest in the market".

This episode was actually inspired by a conversation I had with a friend/listener of the show.

In this episode I'll cover:

• Average investor performance versus the "market"
• 9 Human behavior biases
• How to avoid these biases
• The conversation that inspired this episode
• Hindsight review on past market commentary
• Non-market examples of growth and recessions

Additional Resources:
Invest Composure Assessment
How Could a Recession Impact You Strategy Guide
Referenced Article from 2015

Explore additional resources @ Level Up Financial Planning 

Music: 80s Motivational Chiptune by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Transcript

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If anything is less than five years, I actually don't have to like any effect. And there's a couple reasons for it. The biggest one is less than five years, anything could happen today or tomorrow. And it typically takes five to seven years to recover from like a full-blown recession on average. And so that's why I don't want my clients to be investing money for short-term goals, anything less than five years, is because I don't want those things that are in the near future to have the possibility of not being able to be fulfilled. This is Techy Personal Finance Bootcamp where I help tech professionals in their 20s and 30s balance a great life today without sacrificing their future possibilities. I'm your host, Lucas Casaris, certified financial planner and founder of Level Up Financial Planning, where I help educate, coach, and build strategies with my clients to help them take their financial confidence to the next level. Here's an important compliance disclosure. This podcast is for informational purposes only and are not to be considered recommendations. It is recommended you consult your trusted financial professional before implementing any information obtained from the Techie Personal Finance Bootcamp. Hello, welcome to Techie Personal Finance Bootcamp. Today I'm really excited because today's episode was actually inspired by a question I got from one of my friends and one of my listeners of the show. So here's a shout out to Caesar, and I'll be referencing his specific question a little bit later in the show. Today I'm going to be talking about timing the market. And so a common question I receive all the time, not just from Caesar, but from a lot of people that I speak with, whether they be clients or just people that are like, hey, you're a financial advisor. Like when is the best time to do this or that? And almost all the time it's with regards to investments and trying to time the market. And so we're going to dive into that today. Before I go too much further, I'm going to add some additional disclosures to the initial ones that you're hearing the show. And so I have no clue what's going to happen tomorrow or even five years from now with regards to the stock market. I'm comfortable with not knowing that because I know that no one knows what's going to happen. So I know there's a lot of experts out there, people that are supposed to know these things, and they do all these different analyses, and everyone has their preferred way of kind of viewing and detailing what they think should be occurring, but they're always split. So no matter how much they're paid or how much of an expert they are, they're usually split 50% on one side saying things are going to be horrible, 50% saying that things are going to be doing awesome. And so what happens is one side is right and the other side is wrong all the time. And so no one really knows what is going on. I'm not going to try to convince you to invest or not with this episode. It's just kind of more of providing you a blueprint of how I think about and analyze my client situation and how I think you can actually apply that to your own. So you don't have to be a client to be able to use some of these things and be aware of some of the emotional biases that humans have. I do want to warn you a lot of times there's people out there that like to say that they properly called something. So if you ever see someone being braggish or promoting things saying that Mr. Papa Giorgio perfectly timed this exact event. So you need this system or algorithm or or whatever it is that they're trying to sell. So just be aware of those gambling winners, too, also like to highlight their greatest hits. But I can guarantee you that almost all of them have lost way, way more money than they've ever won. But that's those are not the stories that they tell you. So what is a random person who perfectly timed a market event not telling you about their other experiences? It's not just time in a specific event of when you should buy. You also need to know when you should sell. And so those are two very different things. And that's that's something that a lot of people don't share with you as well. Is you have to be right at both the buying and selling if you're gonna try to time the market and just get in one of those things wrong, and you could be way behind the eight ball. So, what is the deal with investments? Most people probably know that you should be buying low and selling high, but that's not the normal human instincts. That goes actually against a lot of the human instincts that we we have internally, and so there's actually been an ongoing study, it's called the Dalbar. And Dalbar does these studies that repeatedly show that normal investors underperform the general market by a sizable amount. So here's some of the information I was able to grab from a snapshot. This is for the year ending 2016, so slightly dated. I wasn't gonna pay a couple hundred dollars to access the more current data, but this this stuff is kind of a recurrent trend every single year, very little changes, and always pointed to normal investors underperforming what the actual market is performing and doing itself. So here's a couple of snapshots from that. So in the last 30 years from that time period, investors would have returned 3.98%, comparing that to the general market, and we'll use the SP 500 as that kind of index, that returned 10.16%. So that is over 6% difference. Pretty sizable difference between what a normal person would get and what uh the general market would be able to provide during that time period. Some periods are not nearly as severe as this, but some are even greater, and we'll just look at a couple more snapshots in time. So looking at a 20-year time frame, the average investor would have returned 4.79%. The SP 500, again, what we're using as that benchmark would have returned 7.68%. So it got a little bit narrower here, a little bit less than 3%. But let's continue on. So five year an investor could have expected to get 9.83%, but the SP 500 would have returned 14.66%. And the last 12 months from the end of year 2016, remember, someone would have received 7.26%, and the SP 500 would have returned 11.96%. So it's looking like the average is floats around 3 to 5%, depending on the different snapshots and time, and depends on what people are doing during those periods of time as well. I know those were a lot of numbers I was throwing at you, but yeah, that's that's the biggest takeaway is that normal investors underperform, and there's a lot of reasons for that. But before we dive into those reasons, I think it's important to remember that those are the average investors. Some may do better, and so it's possible that people could definitely outperform uh even the S P 500, but it's very rare, and people should consider themselves lucky just to get the average return that average investors get, because some do even worse. And so if you think about the average, that means there's people above that and there's people below that that are getting you that average return. So, what the Delber study did to kind of outline why they see this happening is they call them nine irrational investment behavior biases, which lead to investors just constantly underperforming the overall market. So the the first one, and I'll kind of give you the the name and I'll give you a brief description and some examples sometimes. And so loss aversion. So that's the fear of loss, and that's when flight or fight kicks in. Most will flee when fare gets too high, which is likely after they've already experienced a big drop in value. So loss aversion has also been found in millennials. Just looking at all the multiple studies that have been coming out, they say that millennials are actually do an awesome job at saving, but they are afraid of investing. And the reason for that is because of what they've seen their parents and grandparents go through during the last recession, uh, which is when a lot of the millennials were starting to become adults and start to notice the world around us a little bit more. So it makes sense that they're a little bit more fearful from experiencing that, even though it wasn't their own money. The next one is narrow framing, and so that's when you make decisions about one part of your portfolio with blinders to the rest of your investments or the rest of your goals and kind of what's going on. So you just get super narrowly focused in on something, you kind of get tunnel vision. So I see this happen a lot when you don't have a legit financial plan. It's very easy to focus on stuff that doesn't matter and is not relevant because you don't have that guide in light that why what this money is even for, anyways. Another one is called anchoring. So this is the process of remaining focus on a specific thought process without allowing new information to be considered. I'm sure you you know a lot of people where this is the case where like, uh, like I'm giving you information that is clearly something that you're not processing in, and so how come it's not registered? And it's because those people, and and we do it ourselves too. Like, I know there's a lot of things that I get emotionally anchored to, and then it makes it really hard to accept the the new information. So that's basically what happens with anchoring. There's also one called mental accounting, so that's when you can kind of start to justify your stuff in your head. So you separating performance of investments mentally to justify success and failure. So, an example of what you may tell yourself or someone may tell themselves is I picked this one perfectly. Like I was awesome. I did such an amazing job at picking this out. I can do this all the time, but uh, when there's one that didn't go quite the way you were expecting or didn't go in your favor, that happened because of some external event. So that that's not your fault. Here's a big tip. They're all external events. You can't, yes, you get to to look at miscellaneous data, but everything is external. You can't control what's going to happen with those investments at all, basically. So that's that's important to remember. The things that you can control are the things in your own personal life. So a huge one I've seen for tech professionals is lack of diversification. And so that happens because of your employer is typically a tech company and they're usually really great about offering equity compensation packages, whether it be employer stock purchase plans, non-qualified stock options, RSUs, these things all end up start building up over time. If you're not selling the stock, it could easily start to grow to be a sizable amount of your wealth. That happens, but then also, even if you have been good and diligent at making sure that doesn't become a high proportion of your wealth, you still may tend to lean on investing in technology-based companies. So that's just something to be aware of that you're gonna have that bias because that's where you feel comfortable with. You feel like you know the technology aspect, which I'm sure you do, but what you don't know is that the various business models, uh, all the different global dynamics, what's going on with the books, whether they're managing their funds and investments properly. So there's there's a lot outside of your control that it's not just the technology. People have had awesome companies, but ran them horribly, and that ends up showing in the stock performance. So uh be aware that that's a huge one for tech professionals to kind of get stuck in is that bias of of just loving tech so much that you're not diversifying and putting all your eggs in in one basket. So this one should make a lot of sense to people. It's called herding. So following what everyone else is doing is kind of what that means. So if the market's going down, that is because there are actually more sellers than buyers. And so the urge to want to sell means that you are selling low and following the herd. So that's something that could set you up for disaster if you kind of follow the herd and that mentality. It's actually harmful as well. So if the the market is going up and the opposite happens, where on the way up, you're you're kind of sitting on the sidelines at first, but then it gets really hot and everyone's buying, and so you want to jump in and buy, but you waited years or months, and now things are a lot more expensive. So what happens there is you're buying high, and then if the herd starts to move in the the other direction and you start to sell, usually you'll sell once those numbers are hitting lower numbers, so you're selling low. The biggest mistake you can do. I know I mentioned it earlier that the key and the goal of investing is buying low and selling high, but with the herd mentality, it almost always forces you to do the opposite buying high and selling low, which is just a way to lose money and underperform constantly. An interesting one that I found with this report was regret. They say that this is when you're not performing a necessary action that should be happening because of regret of a previous failure of a similar situation. If you think about it this way, have you ever been burned by a decision? And then it just made it that much harder to put yourself in that same position, even if you know it it's beneficial and the circumstances are different, you're still kind of have that regret weighing on you from that previous burn. A huge impact to just people's emotions and the stock market in general is a response to media. This be like the news, news on TV, newspapers, but now it's extending to social media. The biggest headlines usually evoke the feeling of fear, and that's what brings people to want to come back and see, keep up on stuff like, oh, has that changed? Hasn't gotten it worse, hasn't gotten better. And so that brings an audience which helps pay for the advertisements and things of that nature. So that's why there's a disproportionate amount of negative media, and it's to kind of instill that fear and wanting you to come back and constantly be updated. That's very rarely a positive thing for keeping a clear mind about your investments. I'm an optimistic person like almost all the time, but with most things, uh, it is good to be optimistic. But in the study, they actually found that many are optimistic only during times of good, and then they don't really understand the whole kind of picture, what could potentially happen. And so they kind of flip out and they they flip to the polar opposite. So they're they're blindly optimistic, and then all of a sudden they get smacked with reality that oh, the stock market, although it has gone up over long periods of time, when you kind of look at those longer snapshots, there are periods definitely where it does uh get volatile, it drops. You could be talking about losses temporarily in those investments, and so when people get smacked with that, it really changes their optimistic outlook, and so they actually go to being a pessimist really quickly because that the optimism wasn't really founded on education or confidence, it was just kind of a blind feeling of optimism. So that's important to be aware of because that that was another one I was kind of surprised about that they pointed out. So, how can you actually avoid all these human biases? And so that was nine, I'm sure there's more. Some of those were were new to me, but I think like anything, you just have to have a discipline approach. So this can be a set of rules, a set of guidelines, a system that you set up, but whatever it is, you want it to probably be written down and be official, and you don't want it in your head because it's really easy to trick ourselves and to easily kind of talk our way around or to just kind of make up stuff and make exceptions. And then once you do that, you're letting these biases creep in, like, oh, this is why I'm anchoring on this, or this is why I'm focusing on this particular thing, and making exceptions to these rules. So it's very important to be very disciplined with your approach, regardless of uh which approach you take. And remember, it does only take one big mistake to permanently derail your plan and your wealth potential. So I know most of you are early in your career listening to this, and you can definitely ride out storms and make mistakes and learn from those things, but I can tell you you'd much rather want to learn from other people's mistakes and avoid mistakes because your wealth potential just grows exponentially at that point. And I actually believe in having a plan so much, it's why I actually refuse to do investment management only for clients. That's actually a popular way of how most financial advisors would prefer to help their clients. They don't want to talk about your goals, they don't want to help you manage your money or have greater financial confidence or figure out how much you should spend on this loan or that mortgage, any of these things. They prefer that you give them the money to manage and you don't call them and and and maybe you'll have a brief conversation once a year. I do not like that because what happens is when there is turmoil, because there is there is gonna come a day where markets are gonna get really choppy and that's gonna be very scary. You need to have that discipline and have that focus to understand like what it is that's actually important and what can you control. And that's why I don't like the investment management only, because I really don't have any ground to stand on other than like the educational aspect. But by then it's too late to to try to talk someone off a ledge in many instances. So I have a lot more fun with the actual creating the plan, understanding what's important to people, because that's what I'm able to help them focus on and kind of ride out those tough times. So I'm actually gonna give you a couple tips or at least give you a rough outline of how I actually build my clients' plans. And so the biggest thing by far is just focusing on the why. What is the money actually for, anyways? Because once we know what it's for, once we know those timelines, it makes it a lot easier to get through all of the confusing stuff, all of the emotional things that are going on, whether it's uh the media or just internally, uh stress, fear, change, whatever it is, we can focus on what really matters and actually see if it anything in the market going on right now even impacts what your goals are because you still might be on track, anyways, to do all the things you want to do. And once my clients realize that, then they calm down there. They they don't feel like they have to make a drastic move or maneuver and and they feel a lot better knowing that they have a lot of control over their situation. So that the next step from there is just finding out what and where the current resources are. So uh that could be current income, that could be current assets, 401ks, savings accounts, uh, different things like that. So getting a clear picture of where all your stuff is, that's helpful too in those times of chaotic situations. If the market's jumping around or you're just feeling on edge, if you're able to go and see where everything is, that's a lot easier than having to scramble around, log into five different places, and not really have a full picture. Same thing happens too for like spouses and couples, is if you're your your stuff is siloed off on your own side, it's sometimes a little bit more stressful because you don't know kind of what's what the other one's doing or what that's what's going on over there. And so bringing that all into one login, you can use mint. My clients have their own wealth management portal that operates like mint from that capacity, just being able to see their whole net worth and what's going on, regardless of who's the owner of the accounts. From there, we can actually back into and figure out how aggressive you actually need to be in order to achieve your goals. So we know what your resources are, we know what your income is, we know what you could potentially save or what the current savings clip is, I would say. And from that, we can say, well, this is how much of a return we need, which then tells us how aggressive our investments need to look like. And it would be nice if that was just that was the thing. If we said, you know what, you have to go 100 miles per hour and and that was it and everything was cool, then that would be really easy. Uh we wouldn't run into these biases or anything like that. But uh, I definitely feel that people need to have a more in-depth conversation and have a realization about what your own personal risk preferences are as well. Actually, I have a couple of pieces and tools that I use to analyze that because what if what if you were comfortable with 100 miles per hour, but you have a significant other and they're totally not cool with that? So we need to know not only just yours, but to everyone who's gonna be involved with the plan and are you cool with flying down the road 100 miles per hour? Because that's what we need to do in order to give ourselves a chance and and just be aware that it's not a a clear highway for you to just free roam on. Uh, it could start to storm, there could be other vehicles jacking for position, could be wild animals jumping in front of the road. Um, you might be driving at night. So there's it's not like it's oh yeah, it's this, and it's just easy as pie to just go ahead and follow that recommendation. We have to make sure that you can actually understand what potential uh risk could occur in the short term, and so that's something I always like to review and and make sure people understand that just because we say that this is what we're gonna do in the long term, it's gonna feel good. That doesn't mean that it's gonna be a smooth ride throughout the whole process. So we need to make sure things match up. Speaking of that, it's important to know the timeline again is if anything is less than five years, I actually don't have my clients invest any of that. And there's a couple reasons for it. The biggest one is less than five years, anything could happen today or tomorrow. And it typically takes five to seven years to recover from like a full-blown recession on average. And so that's why I don't want my clients to be investing money for short-term goals, anything less than five years, is because I don't want those things that are in the near future to have the possibility of not being able to be fulfilled. So that's one part of it, and another reason for that too is you can actually get about a 2%, sometimes even higher interest rate for a savings account. So that's new to you. You should definitely do an online search and see if you can find one that's an insured account. So you'd look for the FDIC insured, or if it's a credit union, it'd say NCUA. But as long as it's insured savings, you can have confidence that you're not going to lose money from going that route. And so this one doesn't actually impact investments too much because that those first three steps. Handle figuring out what's going on with investments, what needs to happen there. But then there's actually a fourth piece of it where if there are any gaps, if they're not on track, like even going 100 miles per hour isn't going to get you to where you need with what we've outlined. Like we check for gaps, we make sure if there's anything we can improve, be more efficient, and just have a general overall gain of confidence. How can we make your situation better? I never expect my clients to turn into a different person, but I do expect them to be willing to kind of level up and make those small incremental changes because they do add up over time. The last thing I want to actually address is going to be the actual question that Caesar provided me, which again, thank you, Caesar. This is a great question that inspired this episode. So uh the question went roughly like this. So I have a chunk of money that I want to invest, but I think this market is inflated. I want to wait until it resets to get back in. So I don't sound anything like Caesar, but that's what he asks. And here's my response. Haha, people have been saying that at least the last four to five years. If it's long-term money, you should probably deploy chunks of it monthly. The last part from him before I told him that I'll actually record an episode on this, he said, I mean, this isn't sustainable, right? Obviously, we we shared a little bit more words on that, but uh that's basically the gist of the conversation. And he's actually a data analytics guy too, so he's probably already ran a lot of crazy computation. And and he may be right and he may be wrong. I'm not here to to uh predict the future or to decide one way or another. But one thing I wanted to do, so I I felt like I had to come to this show with uh very specific data. And this this isn't something that I do regularly go and research historical data, but it I thought it would be helpful. And so sure enough, I found an article from four years ago. It was actually January 13th, 2015, and the exact title was The Stock Market is Overvalued Any Way You Look at It. The writer identified six why they use and time-tested ratios, and looking at the graphical data, you'd say, like, oh crap, like yeah, everything on this makes it seem like it would be overvalued by the stats that are showing up in this thing. How did that actually impact what in reality happened? Which we can say now because we will we are in the future of uh when the article is written. And so just the other day on August 9th, 2019, the SP 500 was 2918.65. And going back to when that article is written, so January 12th, 2015, the SP 500 was 2028.26. So percentage-wise, the SP 500 is increased 44% if we compare that back to the January 12, 2015 date. Doesn't matter what what those numbers showed, right? Um, obviously we know what happened, and yeah, there's been a few bumps and along the road between now and then, but they haven't really been all that bad, to be completely honest. I I think that's important to just be aware of that. Just because stats say one thing doesn't necessarily mean that it's indicative that there's gonna be a drastic change in the markets. There's a lot of other things that go on, and that's why it's so hard to predict. There's we're living a global world and things are shifting and changing all over the place. What happens if someone actually decided to sit on the sidelines because of this article back on January 13, 2015? So, in order for them to actually be right, they'd actually, if they're still sitting on the sidelines now, they would need the market to fall at least by 30%. And so I know that seems worried that it's gone up 44%, but just how they the ratios and the mathematics work, it had to fall 30% just to kind of break even back with where that value was back in 2015. So it'd actually have to fall further than that in order for them to really say that they were right and accurate, that it was overvalued and that uh it was gonna fall in value as a result. Here's what most likely happened, though. People that are freaked out by those types of uh scenarios, those types of stats, they probably waited on the sideline until they saw the market went up and it kept going up, and they're like, oh man, I'm gonna miss out, so I'm gonna jump in. And so even though they had the money already back January 13, 2015, they were sitting on the sidelines and they didn't jump in until later when most likely the value's gone up substantially from that date. So they lost out on a lot of growth potential there. What happens when there's another article? There's a statistic still showing one thing or another, indicating that maybe valuations are too high again. Their spidey senses might start tingling, and then they may start to jump out after the market has already lost some value there. So they jump out again and and they say to themselves, uh, similar to the wording that uh Caesar use, is waiting for the market to reset. But what does that even mean? Who knows what a reset actually is? Is it 5%, 10%, 20%? Like when are you gonna jump back in? How do you know when the right time's gonna be? And again, I've mentioned this a couple of times, but you don't have to just be right getting in, but you have to be right getting out. If you are not right on both of those calls, then you're likely gonna underperform as a result. And so that's why it is so tricky. That's why most people underperform is uh they might get one of those things right, but then they either wait too long to get back in or they get in at the wrong time, and it only takes one instance of being wrong out of those two decisions. So that article had statistics in it, and you can say that the statistics are wrong, but really all they are are numbers. What was wrong was the assumption that writer ended up drawing from them. What do you think happened between now and then? Like we know what happened with the actual value, but what actually happened is yes, there was bumps along the way, but we actually kept growing, and at least from what those numbers and those statistics were showing, we grew into those numbers. Now, according to Caesar, there's currently overvalued stats showing that things are overvalued right now. So, what does that mean? Are we gonna grow into that or are we not gonna be capable of those types of things? Really, what we're not doing is we're not buying what the state of stuff is today. When you're investing, you're investing for that long-term future payoff. And so that's why you're projecting when people are investing, they're doing it on potential future growth. And so I know we've been talking about the stock market, which may seem a little different and like a whole nother language to you, but let me see if I can tie it to you. Some other things that might be a little bit easier to imagine. And and these are some kind of real life things that I've dealt with. Uh hopefully they'll make a little bit of sense to you. This example is gonna kind of show you how markets can grow against the stats, but I'm not gonna be talking about the markets. So maybe the data being analyzed doesn't actually matter. And so, have you ever exceeded expectations? Maybe you failed freshman year. I actually did. Maybe you had teachers who thought you were dumb. I did. I actually uh I probably was a punk in high school, so I that's not completely their fault, but they intentionally tried to make me look dumb in front of my classmates, and they actually backfired on them because they were asking me questions with an attitude making sound like, oh, I'm gonna look really dumb if if I don't get this right. But I did get it right, and I said it back with the equal attitude they gave me. So obviously they didn't like that, but that's beside the point. So they're teachers, they're they should have a good gauge for those types of things. They should be experts, right? But they didn't know all the moving parts or that their measurements that they were kind of using were not really indicative of what my intelligence it just wasn't the proper information to make those calls accurately. And the bottom line is they thought they knew what my growth potential was. Even if they were right, does that mean that I'm not capable of growing and kind of getting getting better from that time period? So maybe I answered those questions wrong. I'm gonna make sure that doesn't happen again, basically. I would learn. And so that's that's kind of another point to make there. Here's another thing kind of going against the stats. So maybe people are just more focused on potential. I I mentioned that that's why people invest in the stock market in general, is because it's not where we are today, it's where we expect these companies, these countries to be moving in the future. And so I've had positions, employment positions, where I had to fake it until I made it. So I don't know if anyone listening can relate to that, but that that's happened to me a couple of times. And not only did I grow into those positions, but I grew out of them as well. So I I figured out what the heck I uh didn't know and got better and got better and actually grew out of those positions, and and hopefully I'm gonna continue to do those types of things, continuously grow and and you as well. So uh that may be another way to think about how people think about these things, and it's not based off of what the value is today, it's more the potential of what's available, and and obviously those people that gave me those positions saw that I had potential, even though I was freaking out internally. Here's uh another example. So even if they are right with the statistics and and maybe there is a pullback, like what what does that mean? And again, this is gonna be a non-uh stock market story to just kind of give you an example. So, and this one's a little bit harder to make sense, but I'm gonna give it a try anyway. So, my son is a little guy, he's floating around the one to three percentile every time he goes in for his checkups. He's always growing and doing good. Since he's grown, we buy him clothes, and sometimes we we get a little bit too far ahead of ourselves, and the clothes are big on him, they're baggy on them, and obviously we're not gonna send him out looking all goofy. So eventually he's gonna grow into them. A few months back, he actually got really sick and he didn't eat for almost a whole week, and we were freaking out. He was like a toothpick because he was already small, but that yeah, he's he was tiny. Did we end up throwing out his clothes because they were even bagger on him now than they were uh before he got sick? No, because we we knew that he was growing and that he's actually gonna recover from this sickness too and get back to his normal weight, but then he'll also continue to grow after that point. That last one just kind of reminds me and makes me think about how I envision the economy and the stock market, capitalist type markets, is that they're live and breathing things that for the most part are built to grow. They they'll have times of slow growth, there'll be times of sickness, which means that maybe it's not performing as well, maybe it's a losing value, but there's also gonna be times of innovation and and growth. So all these things are gonna be constantly at play. But the whole goal for everyone is that we're always gonna be better in ourselves and and growing, and that tends to play true with investment choices. So as we close out the show, I have a few quotes. So this first one is a little goofy, it's actually my own. But my wife asks me the other day, is like, well, what happens if everything goes to zero? So if the stock market ever goes to zero, which I don't believe will ever happen, but even if it did, we'll we'll definitely have bigger things to worry about, like zombie apocalypse type worries. Like we're we're not gonna have internet, we're not gonna have electricity, people aren't gonna care if you used to work for Apple or if you have a Tesla because those things are just not gonna matter. Your US currency may not even matter at that point. So things that we value today would not be the same things that are gonna be valued in a world where there's no companies that are worth anything, basically. So that's that's why I'm always comfortable in diversifying investments and and making that very strong opinion that the market is never gonna go to zero if you're diversified. Here's a more common one that you you may have seen if you've ever followed investments, but it's actually I I don't know who said the original quote. I did a search, Google just kept showing me a bunch of different old guys that had the quote next to their picture, and but uh the quote is the main point. So, what the quote says is that time in the market is more important than time in the market. So I'll say that again. Time in the market is more important than time in the market. So I'll leave you with that. Thank you for listening to today's episode. And I'm actually gonna have a free resource, there's a free assessment that you can take as far as evaluating your investor composure because I think that's a big piece of just having comfort, is understanding what your natural tendencies are. It might highlight some of these biases too that we talked about. I'll put that in the show notes and feel free to check that out and I'll make it onto where that report's available to you immediately. And uh the biggest thing is you just put in your email address. So as long as you don't mind me having that, I'm never gonna spam you with anything. Go ahead and put that in and check out your volatility composure. And yeah, hopefully it's something that will empower you to have more confidence when it comes to managing your investments. Thank you for listening to Techie Personal Finance Bootcamp. Remember, if you like what you've been hearing, to subscribe, review, and share with your friends and colleagues. I'm also still taking suggestions for future episode topics and guests. If you want to take your connection to the show to the next level, you can find me on LinkedIn or on Facebook. Catch you next time on Tech EPersonal Finance Bootcamp.