Welcome to our Winter Newsletter! 
 
The new year has begun with a plethora of news that directly impact markets and investments – and much of it has been negative, including the most recent conflict in Iran. However, so far this year, markets have proven to be fairly resilient, even during the first few days of this conflict.

One question we’ve heard quite a few times lately is “Why?”

Before I address that question, I must speak to a difficult reality of discussing certain events, especially wars, in the context of what we do as financial advisors and investment managers. Sometimes we have to talk about horrific things in ways that feel somewhat cold. While we consider markets and economic realities, we never want to lose sight of the human cost behind these events. The impact of war, displacement, and tragedy is very real, and we remain deeply sensitive to those suffering. Our goal is never to treat these crises as mere data points, but to balance that human reality with the financial landscape, so we can be both informed and empathetic as we move forward.

That said, regular readers of these pieces or listeners to our webcasts have heard me say this phrase before: markets can handle good news, and markets can handle bad news, but what they don’t like is unexpected news. The situation in Iran, while incredibly serious, was not entirely unforeseen. This is also true of many of the other major economic stories that have marked the landscape of this already very