From the Desk of the Chief Investment Officer July 2026

Reality Keeps Score

I have to admit something. I really didn’t see this one coming. 

If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be opening our mid-year update talking about how much of my summer has been dominated by World Cup soccer, I would not have believed you. What first grabbed me was the physicality, and I don’t think watching on TV does it any justice.

These players are flying all over the field at full speed, sacrificing their bodies, absorbing contact, getting knocked around, getting back up, and doing it all over again. Every once in a while there’s a player or two who looks like they’re auditioning for an Academy Award. But if you watch enough matches, you quickly realize the flopping isn’t what the game is about. The overwhelming majority of what you’re watching is toughness and discipline and conditioning. It’s the willingness to do the things that oftentimes nobody notices. 

But that isn’t what surprised me most. After a few matches, I realized my eyes had drifted away from the ball entirely. I was watching the players who didn’t have possession. The runs. The positioning. The spacing. The discipline to hold a position even though they might not touch the ball that entire possession. Millions of people watching, and the players are spending the overwhelming majority of their time doing things that will never appear on a highlight reel. Quietly doing the things that ultimately determine who wins and who loses.

It got me thinking about how we all tend to watch just about everything in our lives. We have incredibly short attention spans. We remember the goal. We remember the penalty kicks. We remember the controversial call at the end of the match. We remember the dramatic finishes.

But reality doesn’t remember only those moments. Reality remembers every pass, every decision, every lapse in concentration, the technique, the discipline. In other words, reality has a much longer attention span than we do. And I think that’s true whether we’re talking about sports, business, parenting, health, and dare I say, investing.

The Rules Don’t Care Whether We Acknowledge Them

The other part of this that fascinated me was the rules themselves. You watch the offside calls, you start to understand the game a little better, and you realize these players are consistently pushing the boundaries. They’ll grab a jersey. They’ll make an aggressive charge. They’ll create every advantage they possibly can. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

I don’t think that’s unique to soccer. I think that’s a human trait. That’s human nature. We tend to look for exceptions. We all tell ourselves that maybe this particular situation is different. And every once in a while we get rewarded for it. Maybe nothing bad happens. In fact, sometimes something good happens. But that doesn’t invalidate the rule. It simply means the consequences haven’t shown up yet. Reality is keeping score whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Being Right Is Not the Same as Knowing What to Do

The more I thought about it, the more I realized investing works just like that.

Every few years, investors become completely consumed by the headlines. Whatever story happens to dominate today. What is it right now? It’s artificial intelligence. It’s the extraordinary concentration of the largest companies in America, those “Magnificent Seven” you’ve heard about. It’s the biggest IPO in history. It’s the endless debate about whether or not we’re in the middle of a bubble. Before this it was something else, and before that it was something else again. Every generation somehow becomes convinced that today’s story is different from all the stories that came before.

That reminded me of the former Federal Reserve Chair, Alan Greenspan, and his famous speech back in December of 1996. Most people remember the phrase “irrational exuberance,” coined by Greenspan. It’s become part of investment folklore. But what most people forget is what happened afterward.

Greenspan was questioning, rather quietly, whether enthusiasm at that time had become excessive, and history would eventually suggest that he was probably right. Valuations had become extraordinary. Speculation was off the charts. The dot-com bubble did eventually collapse. But here’s the important part. From the time of that speech, the market went on to produce extraordinary returns for more than three years.

So I have to ask. Was Greenspan right? Was he wrong? I don’t know. I think he was asking the right question. The problem, though, wasn’t whether he was right. The problem was whether his conclusion was actually usable to investors like you and me.

Suppose you agreed with him completely. What exactly were you supposed to do? Sell right away? Sit in cash? Wait six months? A year? Three years? Five? You might have been absolutely correct about valuations while simultaneously making one of the worst investment decisions you could have made in your lifetime.

I think that’s one of the most important distinctions an investor can learn. Being right about what’s happening is not the same as knowing what to do about it. Those are completely different skills, and history suggests that nobody possesses that second one consistently. If the chairman of the Federal Reserve couldn’t tell investors precisely when enthusiasm was finally going to exhaust itself, why do we continue believing that someone else can? Why do we continue looking for someone who can tell us exactly when to get in, exactly when to get out, when to be defensive, when to be aggressive?

I would submit that’s asking the wrong question altogether. The better question is this. If reality doesn’t care about our opinions and predictions and confidence or fears, then what rules should we organize our financial lives around? Because whether we choose to acknowledge those rules or not is completely irrelevant. Reality doesn’t negotiate with them. It simply keeps score.

That’s exactly why the principles that guide every investment decision we make are the same principles that guided us before AI, before COVID, before the financial crisis of 2008, before dot-com. And they’ll be the same principles guiding us long after today’s headlines have been replaced by tomorrow’s.

As always, I divide this update every six months into two distinct parts. A restatement of our unchanging investment principles, followed by some current observations that I feel can be sensibly drawn from what has been one of the most turbulent six months we’ve seen.

Our Principles

Every six months I like to remind everyone that while the headlines are changing almost daily, our principles do not, nor should they. The world changes. Technology changes. Interest rates change. Presidents change. Markets move from euphoria to fear and then back again. But if the principles that have guided successful long-term investors for generations suddenly need to change because of today’s headline, maybe they weren’t principles to begin with. They were just opinions, and those don’t last very long.

We are goal focused, plan driven, long-term equity investors. Everything we do begins with your life, your family, your retirement, your children, your legacy. Nothing about beating an index over the next six months or predicting what the market will do next quarter. We’re working over decades, not years, toward your most important financial goals. That distinction drives everything we do.

• Sequence matters. We start by identifying and quantifying your most crucial goals, and then we build a rational plan to achieve them. And then, and only then, do we construct a portfolio designed to support that plan. A lot of investors do the opposite. They start with an investment and try to make it fit. We believe the portfolio serves the plan, and the plan serves your goals. It’s never the other way around.

• Unless your goals change, there should be very little reason to update your plan. And if your plan stays intact, so should your portfolio. That doesn’t mean we never make adjustments. We rebalance. We make thoughtful, disciplined changes. But we don’t react emotionally to headlines. One approach is investing. The other is reacting. Reacting is where long-term plans tend to break down.

• We don’t react to current events, economic, financial, geopolitical or otherwise. That doesn’t mean we ignore the news. We stay informed. We just don’t confuse being informed with having the ability to consistently predict what those events will mean for us. History has been very clear on that point.

• We believe that the economy cannot be consistently forecast and the markets cannot be consistently timed. That’s not an opinion. That’s an observation drawn from more than a hundred years of market data. There are endless forecasts about everything from recessions to interest rates and so on. Some will be right. But being right doesn’t tell you what to do, and knowing when to act, or when not to act, is the part that actually matters.

• Because of all that, we remain fully invested to capture the long-term returns that equities have historically provided. We stay invested through both the good times and the bad times. Declines are not a failure of strategy. They’re part of it. They’re simply the price of admission, and it’s one we’ve always been willing to pay.
  

Current Observations

With those principles in mind, let’s talk a bit about where we find ourselves today, because in my experience there really hasn’t been a six-month period quite like the one we’ve just lived through. Take a minute to think about what has actually gone on in the first half of this year.

• A major war.

•  significant disruption in energy prices.

• Inflation that remains a critical concern.

• The possibility of higher rather than lower interest rates.

• Equity valuations near historic highs.

• The extraordinary concentration of the “Magnificent Seven” in the S&P 500.

• By far the largest initial public offering in history.

• And that’s not even talking about politics.

Forgive me if I’ve left anything out, but I think you’d agree it’s been a pretty extraordinary period.

Now let me ask you what I think is the only question that really matters. How could one possibly build a rational investment policy around all of that? How would you decide which headline deserves your attention and which doesn’t? Which prediction should be the one to alter your portfolio? Which event should cause you to abandon years of planning?

I would submit that the answer to all of those is remarkably simple. You don’t. You don’t because you can’t.

What That Means in Practice

It’s precisely at moments like this that I think we should almost stand back and, as funny as that sounds, celebrate the chaos we’re experiencing right now. There’s an important reason for it. None of it has anything to do with the eventual success of your financial plan. We’ve already done the difficult work together. Identifying the goals. Building the plan. Staying disciplined to that plan. Constructing a portfolio designed to give that plan the highest probability of success based on all the years of history we’ve seen.

So in practice, we continue doing what we’ve always done. We remain broadly diversified equity investors. We make adjustments and rebalance periodically, not because we’re attempting to predict the next move in the market, but because discipline requires us to, and to make sure your money is concentrated in good companies that are getting better. As companies ebb and flow in their earnings, most investors feel compelled to buy what has already gone up the most and sell what has already gone down. We attempt to do neither of those. We attempt to remain disciplined enough to let the plan, and not emotion, make the decision.

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that this is very different from the conversations taking place around most dinner tables, golf courses, the break room at the office, and social media. Are people really talking about financial plans? Are they talking about the long-term discipline they’ve maintained through the last twenty years? I doubt it. They’re talking about AI. They’re talking about the hot stock of the moment. They’re talking about the SpaceX IPO. And whether explicitly or quietly, many are carrying a fear of missing out on whatever happens to be the headline of the particular week. Human nature hasn’t changed, and I suspect it never will.

What We Actually Own

Meanwhile, we continue thinking of ourselves as long-term owners of extraordinary businesses rather than traders in this thing that we call the stock market. And from that perspective, I think the best thing to do is marvel at what these businesses continue to accomplish. It’s magical.

These are things we actually own. And over long periods of time, they are the things that ultimately matter.

None of this should be interpreted to mean that the markets can’t experience a significant or even savage decline. Be it tomorrow, next month, or next year, they absolutely can. And as history has shown us, they absolutely will, probably when the overwhelming consensus least suspects it.

But because we’ve already accepted that the ability to consistently forecast the economy and the markets is effectively zero, we’ve also accepted what history has consistently rewarded. We’ll remain invested. We’ll continue executing the plan. We’ll continue owning great businesses. Because while the headlines come and go, and the predictions come and go, reality simply continues to keep score.

Away From the Ball

Which brings me back to where I started. The players I couldn’t stop watching weren’t the ones with the ball. They were the ones making the runs, holding the positioning and the spacing, keeping the discipline to stay somewhere even though they might not touch the ball that entire possession. Spending the overwhelming majority of their time doing things that will never appear on a highlight reel. Quietly doing the things that ultimately determine who wins and who loses.

Reality has a much longer attention span than we do.

Our job has never been to predict what will happen next. Our job has always been to align ourselves with the rules that have quietly created successful investors for generations.

Thank You

To our clients, on behalf of myself and Jim and the rest of the team here at Beck Bode, I want to thank you for your confidence, your trust, and the privilege of allowing us to be part of your lives. It’s genuinely a huge responsibility, and one we never take lightly.

If anything we’ve covered here is on your mind, or if there’s something you’d like to talk through one on one, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re only a phone call away. And for those of you who aren’t clients but found this discussion interesting or thought provoking, please feel free to reach out as well. We’d welcome the conversation.

Sincerely,

Ben Beck, CFP®

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Ben Beck is Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer at Beck Bode, a deliberately different wealth management firm with a unique view on investing, business and life.