The Propeller – Keep Calm and Invest on

The market and most investments, including 401k’s for most of us are down over the last month.  Investing can be a rollercoaster ride, with ups and downs that can make even the most seasoned investors feel uneasy. However, the key to successful investing lies in staying the course and focusing on the long term. Over the past 50 years, the stock market has experienced significant drops multiple times:

30%+ drops: 5 times
20%+ drops: 7 times
10%+ drops: 26 times

Despite these fluctuations, we have always made it out on the other side just fine. This historical perspective underscores the importance of long-term investing and the resilience of the stock market.

Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, emphasizes the importance of long-term investing with several insightful quotes:
 

“Our favorite holding period is forever.”

“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”

“Nobody buys a farm based on whether they think it’s going to rain next year.”

“The stock market is designed to transfer money from the Active to the Patient.”

“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree long time ago.”

These quotes highlight the wisdom of focusing on the long-term potential of investments rather than getting caught up in short-term noise. When you invest for the long term, you can weather the storms and benefit from the growth and recovery that inevitably follow market downturns.

It’s essential to remember that investing is not about timing the market but about time in the market. Trying to predict short-term market movements can lead to costly mistakes and missed opportunities. Instead, maintaining a long-term perspective allows you to stay calm during market volatility and make informed decisions based on your financial goals.

Staying the course and focusing on long-term investing is the key to achieving financial independence. By learning from historical market trends and embracing the wisdom of seasoned investors like Warren Buffett, you can navigate the ups and downs of the stock market with confidence and ultimately achieve your financial goals. Remember, patience and perseverance are your greatest allies in the journey to financial success.

For generations, humans have been entrusting their lives to computers. Air Traffic Control, statistical analysis of bridge resilience, bar codes for drug delivery, even the way stop lights are controlled. But computers aren’t the same as the Large Language Models (LLMs) that run on them.

AI can make errors. Should we wait until it’s perfect before we use it?

If a perfect and reliable world is the standard, we’d never leave the house.

There are two kinds of tasks where it’s clearly useful to trust the output of an AI:

Recoverable: If the AI makes a mistake, you can backtrack without a lot of hassle or expense.

Verifiable: You can inspect the work before you trust it.

Having an AI invest your entire retirement portfolio without oversight seems foolish to me. You won’t know it’s made an error until it’s too late.

On the other hand, taking a photo of the wine list in a restaurant and asking Microsoft Copilot to pick a good value and explain its reasoning meets both criteria for a useful task.

This is one reason why areas like medical diagnosis are so exciting. Confronted with a list of symptoms and given the opportunity for dialog, AI can outperform a human doctor in some situations–and even when it doesn’t, the cost of an error can be minimized while a unique insight could be lifesaving.

Why wouldn’t you want your doctor using AI well?

Pause for a second and consider all the useful ways we can put this easily awarded trust to work. Every time we create a proposal, confront a decision or need to brainstorm, there’s an AI tool at hand, and perhaps we could get better at using and understanding it.

The challenge we’re already facing: Once we see a pattern of AI getting tasks right, we’re inclined to trust it more and more, verifying less often and moving on to tasks that don’t meet these standards.

AI mistakes can be more erratic than human ones (and way less reliable than traditional computers), though, and we don’t know nearly enough to predict their patterns. Once all the human experts have left the building, we might regret our misplaced confidence.

The smart thing is to make these irrevocable choices about trust based on experience and insight, not simply accepting the inevitable short-term economic rationale. And that means leaning into the experiments we can verify and recover from.

You’re either going to work for an AI or have an AI work for you. Which would you prefer?

Most significant improvements in my life have come from removing something, not adding something. My life has benefitted 10x by removing things compared to adding things.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your life is eliminate something that simply does not belong or is not adding value to the life you actually want. Nothing has to replace it. Removing something from your life is a complete strategy.

That’s where people tend to get hung up. They want the replacement before they commit to the removal. But when they can’t come up with a clear, confident, or reasonable alternative, they second-guess the change.

When faced with the prospect of change, no matter how minor, almost every replacement option appears unclear, doubtful, or unreasonable. The status quo suddenly looks more attractive in the shadow of the unknown. Next thing you know, the absence of a suitable alternative becomes the justification for keeping a known problem in their life. They stick with the status quo and change nothing.

You don’t always need an alternative. Most of the time, you don’t, unless you remove a survival resource like housing, money, or health. You want to have good plans in place for replacement with things like that.

But anything else? You can just remove it. You can be done with it. And move forward without it.

Few statements are as rad and exciting as, “We’re on the moon.” And now teams over at spacefaring newcomer, Firefly Aerospace know the feeling firsthand.

Their Blue Ghost robotic spacecraft touched down on to the lunar surface recently without upset or incident. A video online ( https://fireflyspace.com/news/blue-ghost-mission-1-live-updates/ ) shows the truck-sized lander slowly descend, kick up dust, and settle peacefully on the rock below.



Firefly’s achievement isn’t simply another in a long line of spaceflights, either. It represents a significant shift away from government-sponsored missions, marking the first, fully successful commercial moon landing mission.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration predicts that Blue Ghost will operate for up to two weeks, sending high resolution photos back to Earth in the process.

“A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd” – Islwyn Jeneins
 

To lead is to have the courage to question the consensus. To carve your own path. To create by your own design.

Remember that.