I'd wanted to build my own firm for a long time. Not for its own sake, but because I believed — and still believe — that I could serve you best this way: heart on my sleeve, your interests first, with no pressure from above ever asking me to compromise that.
None of this happens without your trust. So before anything else: thank you. My commitment to you hasn't changed and won't — I will work to get better, serve you as fully as I know how, and be honest with you at all times, especially when honesty is inconvenient.
2026: Six Months In
I'm glad to report real progress on your long-term plan through an eventful first half of 2026. I say "your" plan, but I mean it as "ours" — your goals are the only measure I use for my own success.
And I want to be precise about what "progress" means here. It is not simply that account values rose, though they did. Progress is that the businesses (stocks) you own continued to grow their earnings, and continued to raise the dividends they pay you. Had the market gone the other way — as it periodically and unpredictably will — that progress would be no less real. Your wealth was never the quoted price of your holdings. It is the productive capacity of the enterprises behind them.
What Doesn't Change
- We are goal-focused, plan-driven, long-term equity investors. We work in years and decades, not quarters.
- The sequence is always the same: define the goal, build the plan, then build the portfolio suited to the plan. Nothing else comes first.
- Your plan doesn't change because the world got noisy. So the portfolio doesn't either.
- We do not react to the news of the day — economic, financial, or geopolitical. We planned in advance precisely so we wouldn't have to react in the moment. A plan made in a calm hour is the only real defense against a crisis made in an anxious one.
- The economy cannot be reliably forecast. The market cannot be reliably timed. We build our whole approach around accepting that, rather than pretending otherwise.
- Because of this, we stay fully invested — through markets that feel wonderful and through markets that feel terrible. The returns you realize of the whole cycle only belongs to those who sit through the whole cycle.
What Just Happened
Few six-month stretches in my career have been this loud. War. An energy shock. Inflation. A sudden reversal in interest rate expectations. Valuations near record highs alongside extreme concentration in a handful of names. A near-collapse in Bitcoin and precious metals. And, improbably, the largest IPO in history — for a spacecraft company. Have I left anything out?
What rational policy comes out of all that? None — because none is required. That's not evasion; it's the whole point. You already have a goal, a plan, and a portfolio built to serve both. That alignment is what lets us watch the chaos without needing to act on it. It has nothing to do with us.
In practice, that means a broadly diversified portfolio of businesses, rebalanced on occasion — trimming what's grown expensive, adding to what the market has temporarily forgotten. This is the opposite of what most investors do at moments like this, which is chase whatever has already gone up, on the unspoken theory that it can only keep going up.
Meanwhile, the businesses you actually own keep doing the unglamorous work of compounding: earnings rising, margins at record levels, dividends still growing, all while reinvesting in their own future. That is the real story of your account. The market's mood is not.
None of this means the market can't correct sharply, and soon. It can. History says it will — most likely at the exact moment consensus insists it won't. Because we know we cannot time that moment, our plan has never depended on timing it. We will simply ride it out, as we always have.
I'm here for any question or concern, large or small. Thank you, as ever, for the privilege of being your advisor. It remains the honor of my career.
— Andrew