You're Not Irrational. Investor anxiety feels elevated right now, and honestly, it makes sense.
This does not feel like ordinary market volatility. It feels like several major foundations may be shifting at once: the post-war global order, geopolitical stability, the risk of wider conflict, and the growing question of what AI may do to employment and the value of human labor.
That is a lot for people to carry.
So no, you are not irrational if you feel uneasy. And you are not weak if you feel more defensive. You are responding to a world that feels less stable than it did a few years ago.
It's not irrational to feel uneasy. You're responding to a world that feels less stable than it did a few years ago.
Here is one simple way to think about it: if you could give up roughly 2% of upside in exchange for materially reducing the pain of a major drawdown, would you do it?
A lot of thoughtful people would say yes. And they should.
Investing is not a contest to see who can tolerate the most pain. For many people, the smarter choice is to accept a little less upside in exchange for more resilience, less panic risk, and a better chance of sticking with the plan when markets and headlines get ugly.
The problem is that most investors are never shown how to actually do this. They are told to stay the course, ride it out, think long term. And for a long time, that advice looked brilliant — because we had a 40-year tailwind of falling interest rates and expanding money supply doing most of the heavy lifting.
But when the world feels structurally different, "do nothing" is not a plan. It is the absence of one.
There are real tools for this. Buying index puts can protect against deep downside. Put spreads can make that protection cheaper by defining the range you want covered. A collar can reduce the cost further by giving up some upside in exchange for a floor underneath the portfolio.
If a portfolio earns 8% instead of 10%, but avoids the kind of 20–30% drawdown that leads to panic, bad decisions, and years of second-guessing, many investors would make that trade every time.
You do not need to invest like a hedge fund to use these tools. You do not need to apologize for wanting both growth and protection. And you should not be made to feel foolish for wanting a strategy that acknowledges reality instead of pretending risk does not exist.
It is perfectly rational to say: I still want to participate, but I am not willing to let one bad stretch undo years of progress.
You do not need an advisor whose only answer is "sit tight." Sometimes the right answer is to actually do something.
And yes, this is the part where I tell you what we do. If any of this resonates, I am happy to walk through what it looks like for your specific portfolio. That is the work at Longleaf.