This week, the richest man in the world accused the President of the United States of being a sex criminal. A few days earlier, Ukraine used a clever drone attack to seriously impair the air force of a country 4 times its size, and in doing so rewrote the playbook for modern warfare. In April, we slapped a 10% tariff on an island of penguins. All while in the background AI is radically changing the way humanity works and lives at an accelerating rate. This year has been one shocking headline after another.

So what to do about all of it? For the vast majority of the assets of a vast majority of people, the right answer is...nothing.

There are only two ways to participate in financial markets: "investing" and "trading." Investing is creating a robust portfolio of assets that will hit your goals in the long run. You do a bunch of work up front, and then not much afterwards. Trading is trying to time the market, or in the case of 2025 trying to profit from all of the chaos. To do it you need a lot of skill (some luck also helps) and you need to stay glued to everything that is going on every day.

Trading is sexier and more interesting, which is why it gets most of the focus. People turn on CNBC to get the latest hot stock tip, not to be told to buy some low-cost ETFs and then intentionally forget your Schwab password. Yet, investing is the surest thing for almost everyone, if done correctly. For us at Avos, "correctly" means highly diversified across asset classes, geographies, and currencies such that no one thing can hurt you too much.

The table below shows the returns of global markets in the first 5 months of this year. Although chaos reigned in the newspapers, "investing" did well. US assets were flat, but global assets did great, and having currency diversification helped you a lot. On net it was better than the average 5 months.

So do yourself a favor: give yourself the right to ignore anything you want to ignore by "investing" most/all of your money instead of trading it.