Chapter 1: Who is Jason Zweig and what is his expertise?
Would you mind introducing yourself?
Yes, I'm Jason Zweig, and I write the Intelligent Investor column for The Wall Street Journal.
And what makes you so intelligent, Jason Zweig?
Oh, that's a great question, Ryan. So I often hear from readers that I'm stupid, so let's take it head on.
Jason is no dummy. He writes one of The Wall Street Journal's most popular columns, called The Intelligent Investor, where he gives readers advice on how to think about their investments. And for Jason, intelligent investing comes down to a few basic principles.
It's about judgment. It's about common sense and independence and skepticism. Which are harder skills to learn, actually.
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Chapter 2: What are the basic principles of intelligent investing?
They are very difficult to learn. And I, as time passes, I've come to think of them as virtues rather than skills.
Jason's job is to guide those investors. And today, he's going to take some questions to set us on the right path for 2026. Are you ready? I'm ready. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Monday, January 12th. Coming up on the show, how to navigate the stock market intelligently in 2026. So I tried to look this up before we spoke.
You've been writing this column since 2008-ish?
That's correct.
Yep. So the one thing that I feel like is a theme that cuts across all of your columns over these years is that the best thing you can do as an investor is to just buy the market and hold it for the long run. Would you still say that's true?
Yeah, that's definitely my view. And the complications come in because it's boring.
Why do you believe that just buying an index fund and holding it for as long as possible is the best strategy?
Well, there's a couple reasons. The first is that the biggest obstacle to long-term investing success is friction. And that comes from a few different sources. First, most obviously, is fees.
If you're either buying an actively managed investment or you're picking your own investments, every time you or somebody else trades, you incur those costs, and they can be very substantial, especially over the long term. Second is taxes. Every time you trade at a profit, And you sell. You've got to pay taxes on that profit. Yep.
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Chapter 3: Why is buying and holding the market considered a smart strategy?
You lost about roughly 45% over that three-year period. But then the stock market came roaring back. And what I find interesting is if you subtracted the so-called Magnificent Seven, the biggest tech stocks in the country, from last year's 17.9% return, U.S. stocks were still up about 10%. So the non-AI stocks gained more than 10%, which is almost exactly their long-term average return.
So how much damage a collapse in AI would do isn't totally clear. I think it would be very harmful, but I think the stock market would recover maybe faster than people would expect. We'll be right back.
So we got, I want to turn to some questions that we got from the audience about how to invest in 2026. We got this question from Renan Ulrich who asks, what's the low volatility sleep well at night investment portfolio? Basically, what's the safest thing you can do this year?
Diversify. You know, you should basically own everything. The U.S. is roughly two thirds of the total valuation of all the stocks on the planet. So if you have all your money in U.S. stocks, you're missing out on a third of all the opportunities out there. So really the key is if you want to sleep well at night,
The greater the variety of assets you own, the less you should have to worry that any particular investment you own can kill you. It's a piece of what you own. It's not the whole thing.
What about people who are not currently in the market right now? The stock market is reaching record highs all the time. It's more expensive than it's ever been. Is now an okay time to get in or should people wait until the market goes down?
Well, I think the best advice overall for people is to be gradual. Don't do anything suddenly and don't do anything big. If you're concerned that this is a dangerous time to invest, then invest just a little bit and do it every month. You know, invest $100 a month. in a couple of index funds and just put yourself on permanent autopilot. Just every month, $100 goes in.
And as you earn more money, you can raise that. And that means that you can't lose all your money because you didn't put it all in the market. if the market goes down. But if the market goes up, you'll at least make something because you're not out of it entirely.
We got a question along these lines from Lance Robertson in Eugene, Oregon. Shout out to the Ducks. Go Ducks.
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