The stock market is at an all-time high, and investors don’t know what to feel.
If you are invested, you may be dreading the drop that comes next.
If you are on the sidelines, you may be kicking yourself for missing the rally.
Either way, the flood of information isn’t helping.
Every day brings a fresh barrage of headlines — tariffs, interest rates, earnings surprises, geopolitical tensions — each one dressed up to sound urgent.
The result?
Your mind gets jumbled.
Anxiety builds.
And in that fog, you are more likely to make a decision you will regret.
If you think the anxiety is all in your head, consider this: the MSCI US Index has recorded 70 days of swings greater than 1.5 per cent so far in 2026, on an annualised basis.
That’s the most since 2020, when the pandemic sent markets into a tailspin with 71 such days.
For perspective, between 2010 and 2019, there was only an average of around seven such days per year — in other words, volatility today is 10 times more.
Ergo, it’s real, not imagined.
Here’s the thing: the answer is not more information.
You already have plenty of that.
What you need are better questions.
I’d like to share three questions that can help you cut through the noise and regain clarity over your investments.
Question 1: What do I know, what don’t I know, and what can’t I know?
When worry takes over, everything blends into one undifferentiated cloud of fear and confusion.
Tariffs. Recession. AI disruption. Rising costs. It all feels equally threatening and equally urgent.
But it’s not.
The next time you feel overwhelmed, try this: take out a pen and paper, and sort your concerns into three buckets.
The first bucket is what you know.
These are the facts about your investments which you can verify: the company’s revenue, its competitive position, its track record through past downturns.
Write them down.
The second bucket is what you know you don’t know.
Perhaps, you are unsure how a new regulation will affect the business, or whether a competitor’s product will gain traction.
These are legitimate uncertainties, but they are identifiable.
You can monitor them.
The third bucket is what you cannot know ahead of time.
Will there be another pandemic?
A financial crisis?
A black swan event that no one sees coming?
These are the unknown unknowns, and no amount of research will reveal them.
Here’s what this exercise does: it shrinks the cloud.
Once you sort your worries on paper, you will often find that the things keeping you up at night fall into that third bucket – that is, the things no one can predict or control.
Meanwhile, the things you can control – your research, your position sizing, your cash reserves – become clearer.
