Ignore the noise: How to protect your portfolio amid market turbulence

Here's how investors should react during times of uncertainty.

Transcript

00:00Some of the major factors in the recent sell-off we've seen in the market

00:03really sit around uncertainty around trade policy. So by that I mean, after the election,

00:09we saw a certain amount of enthusiasm and exuberance about the new administration coming

00:14in with the idea that they would be pro-growth, pro-business, and good for the market. And all

00:19of that has dissipated over the course of the last three weeks and certainly over the last

00:23week or so. That's because the bad part of the new administration, the things like tariffs and

00:29immigration and certainly cutting the federal spending and firing federal employees have come

00:34first. The sequencing doesn't have an offset. There's no positive attributes that we can say,

00:39well, we've got higher prices with tariffs, but we'll have a lighter regulatory touch or perhaps

00:44corporate taxes will remain the same for the next five years. So investors also feel like they

00:50change the goalposts or what trade policy is going to do for us almost on a daily basis.

00:56So that uncertainty really affects how investors think about the markets. They're pulling back.

01:00It affects how people that run companies actually do their planning for the year. And it certainly

01:05affects, in a real sense, what the economy might do. The longer we remain uncertain,

01:12the further we push out decisions, the more the economy may well slow. And I think that's what

01:18the market's worried about in the here and now. My advice to investors in uncertain times like

01:22this is first and foremost, try to separate the news from the noise. We hear a lot. And

01:28unfortunately, with social media, we hear a lot, 24 hours a day. And not everything you hear is

01:33necessarily going to be the end result. So don't assume some worst case scenarios are going to

01:38happen. So there's been a lot of things that have been thrown around about stagflation,

01:42which we haven't seen since the 70s. And that's likely not going to be the economic

01:47outlook for us this year. We may slow down, but I don't think we're going to go to recession.

01:51But you don't want to make changes to your long-term diversified portfolio because of what's

01:56going on in the current politics. Because it's almost impossible for you to get out and wait

02:02till the dust settles. Because the dust never settles. We're always uncertain about something.

02:07So stick into your game plan, making sure you're diversified. And always remember,

02:11there's more noise than there is news out there. And not everything's a signal.