Dear Family,
There’s an old saying on Wall Street: “Sell in May and go away.”
It sounds wise. It rhymes. Best of all, it gives you something to do. But here’s what I’ve learned about simple rules in complicated systems. They let us act without ever having to understand. They hand us a calendar where we needed judgment, and a feeling where we needed a plan.
Markets don’t reward slogans. They reward behavior. And in a season like this one, your behavior is the whole game.
The headlines are loud right now, and they’re not wrong about the facts. Inflation is still sticky. The Fed’s preferred gauge, the PCE index, rose 0.4% in April, leaving us at 3.8% year-over-year and 3.3% at the core, against a stated target of 2%.
We are a long way from home.
Gas is hovering around $4.40 a gallon nationally, well above last year, so that trip to France you’ve been dreaming about now runs you $1,300 before you’ve packed a bag. Rates are higher than most people guessed, and there’s a new hand on the wheel at the Fed in Chairman Warsh. Just last week the S&P 500 pushed past 7,600 to a fresh all-time high, and this week it’s handing some of it back, sliding toward 7,400 as the AI names that carried us up take a breather. And right on cue, the worry comes flooding in.
That gap between how things feel and how things actually are has a name: the Wall of Worry.
We’ve been climbing it for as long as there have been markets, and the climb has never once been a straight line. Most people believe the market reacts to the news. It doesn’t. It anticipates. It moves six and twelve months ahead of what you’re reading today. By the time a risk feels obvious to all of us, the market has already had its say. What feels like brand-new danger is usually just old news wearing a fresh headline.
That is exactly why we never trade the headlines.
So when the emotions run hot, like they are this week, let’s do something most people refuse to do: let’s look at the math. Just over a week ago the S&P touched an intra-day high of 7,620. Say it dropped 30% from there, about what an average bear market has always looked like. That would take us to roughly 5,330.
Sit with that number, because it feels like a collapse.
But 5,330 is still higher than where we stood right after the tariff shock of April 2025, just thirteen months ago. A bear market doesn’t erase your life’s progress. It rewinds your most recent gains and dares you to flinch. And right on cue, the experts will line up to explain why “this time is different.” Family, those are four of the most expensive words in investing. This time is almost never different.
You’ve heard me say it a hundred ways: the goal was never to be the smartest person in the room. It’s to be the most disciplined.
That’s why we continue to rebalance portfolios as they drift from the mandate we set, not on a schedule, not on a hunch, but whenever the drift demands it. We say thank you for the gains, trim what’s grown too heavy, restore the alignment, and keep our cash ready. We don’t do that because we know what happens next. We do it because we know what has always happened next.
Markets rise, fall, surprise, and recover.
That isn’t prediction. That’s preparation. This is what normalizing excellence looks like when the headlines start screaming.
Summer is when this gets hardest.
The volume drops, the news slows, and the mind fills all that quiet with questions. Should I get out? Should I wait? Should I protect what I’ve made? That itch to “do something” feels responsible, and most of the time it’s the very thing that costs you.
The biggest threat to your long-term wealth was never the volatility. It’s your reaction to it.
Faith that the markets climb over time. Patience to let them. Discipline to stay in your seat while everyone else is up dancing.
Time in the market beats timing the market every single time.
And then there’s the other pull. Not fear. Excitement. AI is reshaping entire industries faster than we can fully grasp, and the most exciting companies of our generation are racing toward the public markets. SpaceX intends to go public June 12th at $135 a share, a deal that values the company near $1.77 trillion and could raise around $75 billion. This week, Anthropic announced its own intention to go public, with OpenAI close behind.
The enthusiasm is real, and I won’t talk you out of believing in progress.
But owning innovation over decades builds wealth. Chasing it over quarters just moves wealth from the impatient to the patient. That’s the line between an investor and a speculator. The speculator sees a dip as a problem; the investor sees a sale. The speculator needs to be right by Friday; the investor lets time do the work.
At LUX, we are investors.
A while back I had the privilege of spending time with the great Howard Marks, and something he said has never left me: where you think there’s no risk is usually where the most risk is hiding. Every season feels uniquely uncertain while you’re living through it. It always has. The work was never to wait for the uncertainty to clear. It never fully does.
The work is to live and invest in a way that refuses to hand uncertainty the keys.
So as we walk into the summer noise, here’s my charge to you: Don’t confuse motion with progress. Don’t mistake a headline for the truth. And don’t trade a long-term plan for a short-term feeling. This time is never truly different. And neither are we.
Still disciplined. Still patient. Still here.
From LUX, With Love
Matt
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