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

If you spent the last year (decade! century!) reading the news, you would have had no shortage of reasons to stay out of the market. Wars, tariffs, political chaos… Prices that kept climbing in ways that made everyday life feel harder. There was always a new reason to wait, always an expert explaining why this moment was dangerous and why patience meant sitting on the sidelines until things settled down.

Things do not settle down. That is not how the world has ever worked, and it’s not how markets work either.

The history of investing is really just a long record of people finding reasons to be afraid and being wrong about what that fear should have led them to do. The everyday people who got wealthy were usually the ones who accepted that there’s no right moment and invested anyway, through the uncertainty and the noise and the years that felt scary.

Lately, you didn’t need to understand trade policy or tariff schedules. You didn’t need to know how to short a stock or read an earnings report. You just needed to do what Buffett has said for decades: buy American. Sit in quality assets such as the S&P 500 and let the greatest wealth-creation engine in human history do what it has always done.

I can see what that kind of patience produces when you look at the people around you. An older relative who is more comfortable now, a little less anxious about what retirement looks like. A younger person watching a down payment slowly become real, a first home going from impossible to distant to almost. This is what compounding looks like when it shows up in someone’s life.

Markets rose again to record highs this week despite everything. Families who stayed invested are retiring, keeping pace with rising costs, and building something durable, not because they predicted anything correctly but because they stayed in long enough for time to do its work.

As Buffett put it, someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. This week was another reminder of who planted those trees and what they were doing when they did it.

What a gift, what a run. Enjoy it!

— Matthew