Markets have climbed a steep wall of worry in recent years, overcoming crisis after crisis while continuing to reach new highs. This post explores why staying invested through uncertainty is often the hardest part of investing, and the most important.

There's always a reason to sell. Staying invesed is the hard part, and the whole point. 

S&P 500 price index, 2020–2026. The market climbed through every one of these. Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices; levels approximate.

 

There have been more than 220 record highs this decade, 26 this year alone. Here's the wall each one had to climb:

 

A global pandemic	Credit Suisse folded into UBS
The fastest 30% crash in history	A U.S. credit-rating downgrad
A global supply-chain breakdown	Evergrande and China's property crisis
Meme-stock mania	Shutdons and debt-ceiling standoffs
40-year-high infation of 9%	A CRE collapse that never came
Russia's invasion of Ukraine	The largest IT outage in history
$140 oil	The yen carry-trade unwind
The Fed hiking 0.75% back-to-back	DeepSeek erasing ~$600B from Nvidia in a day
Cash yields from 0% to 5%	'Liberation Day' tariffs - down 12% in four days
The 2022 bear market	The U.S. losing its last AAA rating
The worst bond market in history	30-year yields at the highest since 2007
One of the worst years ever for 60/40	A war with Iran - then another
Mortgage rates from 3% to 8%	The Strait of Hormuz shut for weeks
Terra/Luna and the FTX collapse	A recession forecast every single year
SVB, Signature and First Republic failing	A decade of worrying about concentration

 

THE BOTTOM LINE | Discipline, not prediction.

Every line above felt, at the time, like the one that would finally end the bull market. None of them did. Markets don't rise because
the news is good – they rise because disciplined investors stay invested and can tell a frightening headline from a broken thesis. Even
this summer's AI selloff was a forced deleveraging, not a change in the fundamentals. Our job is to smooth that ride for our clients
through a disciplined multi-asset class strategy. We do so by evaluating the signals, managing risk, and acting decisively when the
evidence genuinely changes. That discipline is what our process is built on, and it is exactly what our clients are trusting us to deliver,
through every headline still to come.