“Good Grief” & “A Little Perspective Goes a Long Way.”
Access Key Thought Leadership from April 2025.
Good Grief.
This piece was written the week the tariffs came into effect and were “paused.”
As I said then:
→ “If you know what happens next, that makes precisely one of us.”
In the real world, where the future is uncertain, one of your most important jobs as an investor is to bypass that part of your brain that insists it can predict exactly what’s going to happen next by projecting the recent past onto the immediate future. We call that “nowcasting” and it can get you into a lot of trouble if you’re not careful.
We then explored the “pyramid of regret” that Jason Zweig and I had gone into for his piece in The Wall Street Journal.
“Imagine a simple pyramid, says Jonathan Treussard of Treussard Capital Management in Newport Beach, Calif. The pyramid has three layers, each representing a different likelihood of regret.
In the bottom layer are decisions you can take now that you are extremely unlikely to regret later.
The second layer consists of actions that you might later feel some regret over.
The third is made up of drastic decisions that are difficult if not impossible to reverse—making them prime candidates for intense regret down the road.”
From: Trump Just Shredded the Economic Playbook. Here Are Your Next Investing Moves, by Jason Zweig, The Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2025.
But the most fun sentence in the whole piece, with the benefit of hindsight?
→ “Don't be surprised if the stock market is up or down 10–15% over the next month or so.”
That (shockingly) aged very well indeed.
I hope you’ll read the whole thing. This is why writing is so important. Especially when the world is moving fast and forcing you to think carefully.
A Little Perspective Goes a Long Way.
This piece announced that Treussard Capital Management is now registered in the State of New York. That’s a huge amount of fun for me, considering my kids were born there. 🙂
We then worked hard at putting April in perspective.
→ Taking the long view is critical, when the market is driving you to think short term.
When we look at the long range data, it is hard to conclude that “American Exceptionalism” is a thing of the past, with any degree of certainty. Is it possible? Absolutely. Do we know for sure? No, we do not.
So far market moves appear to fit the historical context.
More immediate is the concern that the U.S. economy will slow from here and that people will suffer the consequences of this self-inflicted slowdown, especially if it's paired up with a return of inflation. People call that STAGFLATION, and it doesn't have a lot of fans.
We conclude with a section called Where Does That Leave You? on practical steps to take given the uncertainty we face.
→ Understand your risk exposures now, while markets are giving us time to think.
→ And be prepared to act if conditions deteriorate, all the while hoping that they don't.
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