Details Are Part of Our Difference
David Booth on How to Choose an Advisor
20 Years. 20 Lessons. Still Taking the Long View.
Making the Short List: Citywire Highlights Our Research-Driven Approach
The Tax Law Changed. Our Approach Hasn’t.
Author: Matt Hall
Sketches, Stories, and What Matters Most
Every once in a while, an event reminds me just how much our work together matters. Our evening with Carl Richards was one of those moments…a room full of people opening up, reflecting, and reconnecting with what’s truly important.
A number of you joined us at the Racquet Club in St. Louis for a conversation that was part money, part meaning, and entirely human. Thank you for being there. And for those who couldn’t join in person, we felt your support from afar.
The energy in the room was palpable. People leaned in, shared openly, and allowed themselves to be moved. Since then, we’ve received thoughtful notes inspired by Carl’s sketches. It’s a reminder that a simple line, drawn with intention, can shift how we see our decisions and ourselves.
In my introduction that evening, I shared a story about meeting a couple on vacation whose wife was “famous to some.” That phrase describes Carl perfectly. He isn’t trying to be famous. He’s trying to be useful. Based on your reactions, he was.
The questions I asked Carl reflect the way we think at Hill Investment Group:
- What’s the story behind the sketches that make the complex simple without being simplistic?
- What feelings sit just below our financial decisions?
- How do we align the values we claim with the choices we make?
Carl reminded us that money is rarely the real topic. It’s a doorway into purpose and clarity.
My biggest takeaway from the evening is this:
At Hill Investment Group, our job is twofold. We help clients make the most of their capital, picking up every penny possible through evidence and disciplined implementation. And we help clients make the most of what matters in their lives through goal setting, accountability, and behavioral coaching.
We’ve been doing this work for 20 years, and we plan to keep doing it for 20 more, for a select group of long-view thinkers.
For those outside St. Louis, we want you to feel part of the experience too.
If you’d like a complimentary copy of Carl’s newest book, just email us and we’ll send one your way.
Here’s to a year ahead defined by gratitude, clearer choices, and deeper alignment between money and what matters most.
Take the Long View,
The Slow Things Still Win
The power of slowing down when everything around us says hurry.
I just finished Lonesome Dove (widely considered one of the greatest Westerns of all time). At 850 pages, it doesn’t move quickly, and that’s the point. You can’t rush it. You get pulled into the dust, the dialogue, the ache of it all.
Right after closing the book, I was on Mackinac Island. No cars, no horns. Just horse-drawn carriages, bikes, and time measured by the clop of hooves. Real horsepower! It’s one of the few places that forces a slowdown, and in that stillness, you actually start to notice things again – texture, tone, the weather moving through.
In investing, there’s no reliably fast way to get rich. We all know the parable of the tortoise and the hare, but modern life makes it so tempting to rush. The social media feed refreshes, the markets move, and it feels like we need to move too. It takes real discipline to slow down; to stick with something through the long, quiet stretches.
Fall feels like the right season to remember that. It’s a time of gratitude and reflection, of harvesting what we’ve grown, and of preparing the soil for what’s next.
Investing well isn’t about reacting to every market twitch. It’s about owning global capitalism, rebalancing patiently, and letting time compound the quiet and yet powerful work happening underneath the surface.
We’ve been at this long enough to see it firsthand. Our clients’ returns over the last 20 years, and more than 25 years if you go back to when we first started using this evidence-based approach, tell the story clearly. The discipline of staying invested, diversified, patient, and calm through every kind of market storm pays off.
In a world obsessed with speed, the slow things still win.
Take the long view.
Weathering Uncertainty: Why Staying Invested Still Wins
In this short video, Matt Zenz discusses how to navigate today’s market highs along with the current geopolitical tensions that have some investors worried. Drawing a parallel to the market events from 2019 through 2025, he reminds viewers that—even amid global crises such as pandemics, wars, inflation, and policy shifts—the U.S. stock market (as measured by the S&P 500 Index) has more than doubled.
In other words, by enduring the roller coaster ride, staying invested, and taking the long view, Hill clients aim to capture the market’s inherent growth over time.
Source: S&P 500 Total Return Index (Bloomberg), data from 9/30/2019–9/30/2025.
TRANSCIPT
Matt here, the Chief Investment Officer at Hill Investment Group. We’ve heard from a lot of clients that you love videos, so we answered the call. Here’s another one. Today we’re going to be talking about market risk and current heightened geopolitical tensions.
Right now, the markets are at all time heights and it feels too good to be true. It feels like the shoe has to drop and markets are going to dip. And so we’ve had a few client conversations where our clients were concerned about that and they wanted to know what we should do. So to help answer this question, let’s go back in time a little bit.
Let’s go back to 2019 and imagine we were having a similar conversation. But rather than there being uncertainty I gave you, I said, in the next five years, there’s going to be a global pandemic where entire supply chains are going to be shut down. There’s going to be uncertainty around political elections. Russia is going to invade Ukraine and it’s going to create a potential European conflict. We’re gonna have unprecedented inflation, higher than we’ve ever seen since the 1970s. We’re also gonna have an economic policy in the US where we do global tariffs, completely reordering the global supply chains, not just against their enemies, but also our allies.
If I told you all of these things were going to happen over the next five, six years, would you wanna be invested in the stock market?
You probably would say, no way, get me out. Well, when we look at what happened, the market’s actually doubled since 2019. And if you had gotten out even with perfect foresight of what was going to happen, you would have half the money you’d have today. Now, there is uncertainty in the future as well, but here’s what we do know.
What we do know is that markets are always priced to give investors a positive return. If investors thought the market was going to go down, no one would buy it at that price and the price would correct. And so what we do know is the best way to manage this uncertainty is to stay invested, to capture the returns that the market gives you with the ups and downs. And by taking the long view, you will end up in the best financial situation.
