Focus On The Long Run

I’m in Los Angeles right now on a family trip. The other day my daughter wanted to drive west on Sunset Boulevard out to the coast as the end to our evening itinerary for the day. It was a scenic and beautiful drive from West Hollywood but the last few miles took us through the devastating sights of the Eaton Fire of early 2025.

It seems we are constantly reminded of all of the devastation that occurs on a daily basis in this world. And to come face to face with its aftermath and all of the trauma left in its wake is quite overwhelming. But these fires and all of the other fires of the past are just one part of our history that is both devastating and forward marching.

This month I want to share two charts that I have found enormously helpful in maintaining a long run perspective when it comes to investing for growth in the stock market. One shows the growth of the US market over the past 150 years. And the other shoes International markets over the past 55 years. The charts also show the major historic inventions and catastrophic events that occur along these timelines. Reminding myself of these charts whenever things get either frightening or exhilarating always brings me back to a more balanced frame of mind.

In Ashtanga Yoga when you go into a pose, there is always a focal point that you lock your eyes on to steady your mind and body. The relationship between gaze and steadiness isn't metaphorical. It's physiological. Where the eyes go, the nervous system follows. So when the gaze is fixed and still, the nervous system is calmed.

These two charts have been my investing focal point — the fixed point I return to when markets are terrifying, or when they are thrilling, or when the news is so loud I can barely hear myself think.

What These Charts Show

The first chart tracks U.S. equity markets from 1875 to today — 150 years, plotted on a single line. Above the line, numbered markers note every major technological invention of the era: the telephone, the light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the transistor, the internet, the smartphone, generative AI. Below the line, in red, every catastrophe: world wars, pandemics, market crashes, assassinations, financial crises, terrorist attacks.

There are 27 catastrophes below the line. Nineteen inventions above it.

The second chart zooms out to global markets — US, international developed, and emerging markets — from 1970 forward, with its own catalog of global shocks: the end of Bretton Woods, the Asian financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, the fall of the Soviet Union, COVID, Brexit, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I encourage you to look at these charts for a while. Not to extract a lesson. Just to look.

You can filter by decade. You can rebase all three indices to 100 at the start of any period and watch them grow — or fall — relative to each other.

I want you to look at these charts for a while. Not to extract a lesson. Just to look.

The Thing No One Tells You About Market History

Here is what struck me when I first encountered a version of this chart — the Morningstar edition that my firm used in client presentations for years — and what strikes me still:

Every single red marker was, at the time it happened, described as unprecedented.

Every one.

The 1929 crash was called the end of capitalism. World War II was the end of civilization. The Cuban Missile Crisis was thirteen days during which the world genuinely might have ended. The 2008 financial crisis froze global credit markets in ways that economists said had never happened before. COVID shut down the entire global economy simultaneously, something that had never occurred in recorded history.

And the line kept going up.

Not immediately. Not without pain. Not without real people experiencing real loss. The chart does not minimize any of that. But on the scale of a human investing lifetime — twenty, thirty, forty years — every single drop resolves. Every red marker is eventually dwarfed by what comes after it.

This is not a prediction. It is a pattern. And seeing it plotted, visually, against every disaster you've lived through and every one your grandparents lived through, does something to you that reading about it cannot do.

It becomes embodied knowledge.

My daughter went through a Billy Joel phase recently — Vienna, Piano Man, the classics. But We Didn't Start the Fire surfaced too, including Fall Out Boy's 2023 version, which picks up exactly where Joel left off in 1989 and keeps going — the LA riots, Oklahoma City, 9/11, the Arab Spring, Brexit — all the way to 2023. One unbroken catalog of catastrophe. Joel's original covers 1949 to 1989. Fall Out Boy takes it to 2023. My chart has red markers for nearly every line in both versions — and then keeps going.

The fire never stops. Neither has the historic upward trajectory of the markets.

Focal Points and the Two Failure Modes

Investors tend to fail in two directions, and both are failures of focus.

The first is panic. Markets fall — sometimes sharply, sometimes for what feels like a very long time — and investors look away from the long view and fixate on the drop. The red marker consumes their entire field of vision. They sell. They lock in losses. They wait for "things to settle down," which is another way of saying they wait until prices have already recovered and they've missed the bounce. Then they buy back in near the top.

The second failure mode is the mirror image: euphoria. A new technology emerges, valuations go hyperbolic, everyone around you seems to be getting rich. The dot-com era. Gold in 1980 and again in 2011. Crypto in 2021. AI in 2024. The line goes up so fast it feels like a new era has arrived — like the old rules no longer apply, like this time really is different.

Look at the charts. It is never different. The inventions are real. The technologies genuinely change the world. And markets reliably overshoot, then correct, then resume their long arc.

Both failure modes — panic and euphoria — have the same root cause: a too-narrow time horizon. Eyes fixed on the wrong point.

A focus on the longer run is the antidote to both.

What the International Chart Adds

The second chart — global markets — tells a related but distinct story, and it is one that American investors in particular need to hear.

The U.S. market has been extraordinary. If you zoom into the 1990s or the 2010s, the S&P 500 line climbs while international markets lag, and it can feel like the obvious conclusion is: just own America. Why bother with the rest of the world?

But zoom into the 1970s. Or the 1980s. Or the 2000s.

In the 1970s and 1980s, international developed markets — Europe, Japan, Australia — outperformed the U.S. substantially, in part because of the Plaza Accord in 1985, which weakened the dollar and supercharged foreign returns for American investors. In the 2000s, while the U.S. was still recovering from the dot-com bust and then reeling from the financial crisis, emerging markets had one of their best decades on record.

No single market dominates every decade. Not one. And no one — not even the most sophisticated institutional investors — can reliably predict which will lead next.

This is the evidence base for global diversification. Not a theory. 55 years of data.

The chart makes it visible.

What I Do With This

When a client calls me anxious about a headline — and they do, regularly — I do not argue with the headline. The headline is usually true. The war is real. The recession is real. The virus was real.

What I offer instead is the longer view. I direct their attention back to the chart, to what has always happened on the scale of an investing lifetime, to the pattern that holds even when no individual moment feels like it possibly could.

This is what I mean by focal point. Not denial. Not toxic positivity. Not "don't worry, it'll be fine." It's a fixed point — grounded in evidence, cultivated through repetition — that keeps the nervous system from following every headline off a cliff.

The gaze point doesn't prevent wobbling. It gives you something to return to when the wobble comes.

That is what these charts are. Not a guarantee but a place to return your gaze.

How to Use These Charts

Both charts are interactive. You can hover over any year to see index values. You can toggle the invention and catastrophe markers on and off. On the international chart, you can zoom into any decade and watch all three indices rebase to 100 at the start of that window — making it easy to see which regions led and which lagged within each period.

A few things worth noticing when you explore them:

Every catastrophe looks bigger up close than it does at scale. The 2008 financial crisis, which felt like the end of the financial system, is a visible dip on the 150-year chart — followed by the longest bull market in American history.

Inventions drive long-run growth, but they don't prevent short-term volatility. The internet was real. The dot-com crash was also real. Both are on the chart.

The decades when international outperforms are not the ones most American investors expect. Zoom into the 2000s. Then zoom into the 2010s. The lesson is not that one is better than the other. The lesson is that you can't know in advance.

The line goes up. Over long enough periods, across diversified markets, the line goes up. Not because the world is always good. Because human beings, in aggregate, keep building.

Volatility is the price you pay for building long-term wealth in the markets.

That's not just a mantra. It's what these charts show, decade after decade, catastrophe after catastrophe, new era after new era.

Find your focal point. Return to it.

The practice continues.

The interactive charts referenced in this piece were built for this publication. U.S. data is a composite of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (1875–1957) and the S&P 500 (1957–2025). International data reflects MSCI EAFE and MSCI Emerging Markets indices. Sources: Shiller/Yale, Macrotrends, FRED, MSCI, Dimson-Marsh-Staunton. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Any opinions are those of Katherine Reisfeld and not necessarily those of Raymond James. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and is not a complete description, nor is it a recommendation.

The information contained in this report does not purport to be a complete description of the securities, markets, or developments referred to in this material. Investing involves risk and you may incur a profit or loss regardless of strategy selected, including diversification and asset allocation. Past performance may not be indicative of future results.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), commonly known as “The Dow” is an index representing 30 stock of companies maintained and reviewed by the editors of the Wall Street Journal.

The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index of 500 widely held stocks that is generally considered representative of the U.S. stock market.

The MSCI EAFE (Europe, Australasia, and Far East) is a free float-adjusted market capitalization index that is designed to measure developed market equity performance, excluding the United States & Canada. The EAFE consists of the country indices of 22 developed nations.

The MSCI Emerging Markets is designed to measure equity market performance in 25 emerging market indices. The index's three largest industries are materials, energy, and banks.