Financial Planning Tip April 2025

The opening months of 2025 have been characterized by turmoil and uncertainty for investors. This is neither unique or unusual. Such periods of instability happen regularly and will continue to occur in the future. Many great investors have thought long and hard about how to succeed despite volatility or how to use it to one’s advantage. The secret sauce is not a brilliant market-timing strategy or completely re-vamping one’s investments. Great investors have a strategy and stick to it. They don’t make headlines, but they make money.

Jason Zweig, an author and columnist for The Wall Street Journal put together a collection of investing wisdom he gleaned from great investors over the years. Here is an excerpt we think is very timely:

In order to become a successful investor, it is not necessary to have a higher education, an MBA degree, or a specialized program, to obtain the title of a Chartered Financial Analyst. It doesn’t even require intellectual genius or an infinite ability to outdo everyone else.

It takes the right temperament to be a great investor. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay “Experience”: “ Temperament is an iron wire on which beads are strung. “

The great financial analyst Benjamin Graham believed that the ability to become a smart investor depends more on “character” than intelligence.

Discipline is the greatest of all virtues

Without Discipline, other skills may fail. Means:

• do not invent everything on the go, do not “fly on a whim”,

• using rules, checklists, procedures and policies to make decisions.

Disciplined Investors:

• do not buy anything without detailed research,

• have a list of stocks or other assets to buy when they hit a target price,

• ready to rebalance their portfolio if the stock falls below a predetermined level.

Disciplined Investors:

• move away from chaos

• stay away from people who “go crazy” from speculative trading,

• structure their working day in such a way as to muffle the noise of the markets.

Warren Buffett moved from bustling New York back to Omaha in 1956 and began managing money from his home on a quiet street. Global investor Sir John Templeton moved from New York to the Bahamas, where the Wall Street Journal was published several days late. According to Templeton: “…reading the news a week later, I could put it into perspective and prevent myself from overreacting.”