Mark Gardner

Comments

• Great post Jayaraman! Yes, successful careers don’t just happen —they’re usually the result of someone giving someone a chance before the person is fully ready. The mentors who helped me most weren’t the ones with all the answers. They were the ones who trusted me with responsibility, let me make mistakes, and didn’t rush in take over when I stumbled.

  Post: Developing Champions in your Career and Life

  Link to comment from March 15, 2026

• Bear markets rarely happen when everyone is talking about it and definitely not for the reasons everyone believes it will happen.

  Post: The Anatomy of a Threshold Rebalance: April 2025

  Link to comment from March 15, 2026

• The Only Three Questions That Count by Ken Fisher argues for a method for making better investing decisions by asking three core questions: "What do I believe that's wrong?", "What can I fathom that others can't?", and "What is my brain doing to mislead me?" I think you addressed the first question. You might want to also work through the other two.

  Post: The Anatomy of a Threshold Rebalance: April 2025

  Link to comment from March 15, 2026

• I think this strategy works in fast V shaped recoveries but not so sure about bear markets like the 2000 one. You might want to backtest your approach and see how it would have done. I didn't own any bonds back in 2000, but I vividly remember the cuts from catching that falling knife.

  Post: The Anatomy of a Threshold Rebalance: April 2025

  Link to comment from March 13, 2026

• You are very bold since the day you made the rebalance; it was a coin toss! Taco was still a tasty Mexican dish on that day :) I asked Claude to do some research for me and here is what it told me: "Liberation Day's VIX spike to 52 and ~19% S&P drawdown ranked among the worst in history by speed, but the market treated it as a reversible policy shock rather than a structural crisis like 2008 or COVID (both VIX 80+). The full round-trip took just three months — compared to five months for COVID and four years for the GFC — because the source of uncertainty had a visible off-switch."

  Post: The Anatomy of a Threshold Rebalance: April 2025

  Link to comment from March 13, 2026

• Like always, much of the gold accumulated in bars and coins eventually finds its way into jewelry. As Dorothy said in The Wizard of Oz, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” Modern civilization runs on electricity, fertilizers, and plastics. Without those, our current standard of living wouldn’t exist. About preparing for a true “Level 3” scenario, I’ll admit that kind of world scares me more than it reassures me.

  Post: Why I Own Gold Bars

  Link to comment from March 12, 2026

• In my late 20s I went through the tech bear market. Watching a portfolio collapse early in one’s career is psychologically scarring. At that point I didn’t have much financial capital left—only my future earning power and a mortgage to overshadow it. That experience forced me to educate myself about inflation, risk, and compounding. By the time the Global Financial Crisis arrived, the lesson had already been internalized. I still remember the nausea of watching markets fall, but I did nothing. In hindsight, that restraint made all the difference and it was an important lesson in the psychology of investing. Investing discipline is far harder than the influencers and financial press make it sound. For younger people who ask me about markets, I suggest holding as much as 50% in bonds until they have lived through their first real bear market. Experiencing volatility firsthand is often the only way to understand one’s true risk tolerance. I still have very mixed feelings about the 401(k) plan versus pensions since I am skeptical a vast majority of Americans have the time and interest in this. The next bear market will be another teachable moment for all of us.

  Post: How did you avoid being in the 39%?

  Link to comment from March 6, 2026

• Mark, thank you for a thoughtful post. I liked your framing of volatility not as something investors must avoid, but as something that long-term investors inevitably live with—and, in some sense, must accept as part of the process. One challenge, I think, is how the financial services industry frames risk. Many investors are implicitly led to believe that market returns behave like a tidy normal distribution. That assumption shapes expectations to our detriment. In reality, extreme market moves occur far more frequently than a normal distribution would suggest. The classic example is the 1987 Black Monday crash. Under a normal distribution, a move of that magnitude would be something like a 20-sigma event—statistically expected once in a billion years. Yet it occurred within the span of modern market history. And importantly, the distribution of returns isn’t symmetric: large downward moves tend to occur more often than large upward ones. Given that reality, yes, the only workable strategy is accepting volatility and structuring a portfolio that can tolerate it over very long horizons—not just 10 or 20 years, but often 40+ years. Diversification across uncorrelated asset classes is also important, but equally important is resisting the urge to constantly measure the portfolio’s value. Unfortunately, the media environment—and modern technology—push us in the opposite direction. We can check our portfolios every minute if we want to. Limiting how often we look may be one of the simplest but most effective forms of risk management available to us individual investors.

  Post: Volatility is your Best Friend

  Link to comment from March 4, 2026

• Ross Perot comes to mind a lot these days.

  Post: Is AI going to affect our investments

  Link to comment from March 3, 2026

• It’s absolutely worth celebrating success—discipline and long-term investing are things to be proud of, and sharing that can genuinely encourage others to improve their own habits. Sadly, social media platforms engineered for engagement inevitably tilt toward spectacle, envy, and even exploitation. I am glad you chose to be very circumspect about this. About a decade ago, once I understood how those algorithms actually work, the trade-offs became clear and I stepped away—not because I reject technology or judge anyone who uses it, but because I prefer places like HumbleDollar that invite real conversation. Of course, real human conversations with close friends or family trumps anything online!

  Post: Say It Forward

  Link to comment from February 23, 2026