We put together a histogram of the last 96 years of annual returns, bunching them into percentile ranges. You might expect something that looks like a bell curve, but you would be very wrong! As advisors, we constantly remind clients about the necessity to think long term. The problem is that it’s hard at any age to think in 30-year terms, especially in the middle of a year like 2022.

One of our least favorite things about investing is the remarkable imprecision of language. There are so many terms like “risk,” “momentum,” “smart beta”, and “asset class” (among many others) that have no precise definition– and yet, everyone assumes they know what those terms mean.