The Rebound Isn't Far Off

When you're first starting out in the investing world, you'll hear about many ways to approach investing. Some strategies focus on digging into company fundamentals—reading financial reports, tracking earnings calls, and staying sharp on market data. That method assumes you have both the time and the desire to study each company closely. But for many retail investors, a broader approach—like index funds or ETFs—makes more sense. It’s simple, diversified, and less time-intensive. (They outperform single stocks in most cases over the long term, by the way.)

Still, no strategy is immune to downturns. Even long-term, conservative investors will face moments when the market dips sharply, and the instinct is to sell before things get worse. But this impulse—however natural—is almost always the wrong move. Markets have always recovered, even from historic lows. The market downturns we've experienced in recent years are not as bad as others in our nation's history. It may take months or years, but the rebound has been as reliable as the fall.

That’s why steadiness matters. You invested for a reason, and when the pressure mounts, you’ll need to separate what you feel from what you know. Human nature drives the market—and human nature tends to recover. The same fears that trigger a sell-off also spark a comeback. People are wired to seek gain, and while that impulse can easily tip into greed, it also means the market rarely stays low for long. So when things drop 20% or more, stay the course. Hold your positions. What feels like a crisis is just a sale before the next rally.