Why I Don’t Watch the Ticker and What That Teaches You About Market Volatility
The Ticker on the Wall Is Just Theater
When you walk into a brokerage office and see those numbers scrolling across the screen, I want you to understand something. That is not a tool. That is a prop. I have been asked hundreds of times throughout my career to do daily stock market wraps for radio stations. My answer is always no. Not because I can’t do it, but because I genuinely do not care what the Dow did today, and neither should you.
I don’t sit in front of a screen watching quotes tick by. When clients or colleagues text me mid-recording asking what the market is doing right now, my honest answer is: I have no idea. And that is exactly how it should be.
Understanding the Riptide
The best analogy I have found for modern market volatility is the riptide. If you have ever been caught in one at the ocean, you know what I am talking about. A riptide is a powerful, narrow channel of water pulling you away from shore at tremendous speed. You cannot swim against it. People who try to muscle their way back to shore against a riptide exhaust themselves and drown.
The correct move is to swim across the riptide, not against it, until you get out of it.
Markets work the same way today, and here is why it has gotten more extreme:
- Leverage is baked into everything. Single stock options, four-times leveraged products, complex derivatives. The leverage multiplies momentum in both directions.
- Once a move starts, it feeds itself. Forced liquidations, margin calls, algorithmic selling or buying all compound the move.
- No human can time or stop it. Anyone telling you they can consistently call the top or bottom of these momentum swings is lying to you. Period.
The only rational response to a riptide market is to stop fighting it, get out of the way, and wait for it to burn itself out.
Federal Debt Just Hit 100% of GDP
While everyone was watching market volatility, a data point slipped by that deserves a great deal more alarm than it received. Federal debt has now hit 100% of GDP. The last time this happened was 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
That context matters. In 1946, we had just fought the most destructive war in human history. There was an actual reason the books looked the way they did. What is our excuse today?
Consider what might have been possible had we exercised fiscal discipline coming out of the Clinton years:
- No endless wars draining trillions from the treasury
- Spending kept within reasonable bounds of revenue
- A national balance sheet that left room to respond to genuine crises
- Infrastructure, innovation, and security funded without mortgaging future generations
What This Means for Your Portfolio
Debt at this level has real consequences for investors. A government carrying debt equal to its entire annual economic output has fewer tools available when the next crisis hits. Interest payments crowd out everything else. The pressure to either inflate the debt away or raise taxes increases significantly.
For your portfolio, this reinforces several principles:
- Diversification beyond domestic equities matters more than ever. Sovereign debt risk is real.
- Inflation protection deserves a permanent place in any long-term allocation strategy.
- Stop obsessing over daily market moves. Focus on structural risks that compound quietly over years.
- Avoid leveraged products. When the riptide comes, leverage kills you fastest.
The people who get hurt worst in volatile markets are the ones fighting the tide and the ones who never thought about what happens when the government runs out of runway. Both are avoidable mistakes.
