I Won’t Predict the Market. Here’s What I’ll Do Instead.

Everybody wants to know what happens next in the market. I get it — knowing the future would be incredibly valuable, if it were possible.

It isn’t. And the track record proves it. Plenty of well-known, genuinely smart forecasters have made a single correct call and spent years afterward being wrong, loudly, in public. The media keeps inviting them back anyway, because certainty makes for better television than humility does.

So instead of pretending I can predict what’s next, let me offer a few things I believe are directionally likely, borrowing investor Howard Marks’s rule: “If you name a price, don’t name a date. If you name a date, don’t name a price.”

Profit margins, which are historically high right now, will probably come back down toward normal over time — competition and costs tend to catch up eventually. Market returns going forward are likely to be more modest than the unusually strong stretch we’ve enjoyed recently — not necessarily bad, just less extraordinary. Whatever the current hot investment theme is will eventually stop being the story, and something else will take its place. And today’s market leaders will, at some point, rotate — not because they did anything wrong, but because that’s simply the pattern history shows.

None of that is bold. That’s the point. I’d rather be quietly right than dramatically wrong.

The reason none of this needs to shake your plan is that we’ve already prepared for it — through real diversification, so no single outcome can derail you, and by never investing money in the market that you’ll need in the near term. Marks has another line I love: “You can’t predict. You can prepare.”

I can’t tell you what the market does next month. I can tell you your plan was built assuming I wouldn’t be able to — and that’s exactly why it should hold up regardless.