If you want a resolution that will actually help your investing life in 2026, start here: clean up your media diet.

Not because we’re suggesting you avoid reality or pretend the world is calm. We mean something more practical: be ruthless about who gets access to your attention and what they’re trying to do with it.

Most financial media isn’t designed to help you invest well. It’s designed to keep you watching. So…

Everything is urgent.
Everything is breaking.
Everything is either a bubble or a collapse.
And the “right move” is always: stay tuned.

Your long view plan runs on a different fuel. It’s built on evidence, diversification, and the actual life you’re trying to fund. It’s built on what lasts, not what trends.

The best long view investors are not the ones consuming the most content. They are the ones protecting their attention, staying consistent, and making changes only when the facts change.

A simple filter for 2026:

Before you read or watch anything money-related, ask:
“How is the author trying to make me feel?”
If the answer is “anxious,” close the tab. Move on.

Attention is a financial asset. Treat it like one.

We’re grateful to have Larry Swedroe as both a longtime friend to Hill Investment Group and a foundational voice in the evidence-based investing community. For decades, Larry has helped investors cut through noise, resist prediction-driven thinking, and stay anchored in the data – an approach that has shaped our work and benefited the clients we serve.

In his latest appearance on the October 22nd Excess Returns podcast (the same show our CIO, Matt Zenz, joined recently), Larry brings that perspective to today’s big conversations around tariffs, immigration, AI, and market structure.

“HTC” WARNING: Be forewarned, this is Highly Technical Content, best consumed by the heavy-duty fact finders in our audience and to all those who want to take a deeper dive into why we believe what we believe.

If you only have a few minutes…

Jump to 33:05, where Larry explains why smaller, more nimble funds can access deeper exposures in areas like small-cap value – an insight that reinforces one of the key advantages of our own approach to managing The Longview Advantage ETF (EBI). 

It’s a thoughtful, wide-ranging conversation, and we’re thankful for Larry’s ongoing partnership and the clarity he brings to evidence-based investing.

As we approach year-end, a familiar pattern begins. Financial headlines fill with confident forecasts for the coming year. Market strategists, TV pundits, and well-known investment houses will soon release their precise targets for where the stock market “should” finish in 2026.

These predictions generate attention, but they don’t generate clarity.

When you look back at previous forecast seasons, the lesson is remarkably consistent:

Market predictions, including those from highly respected experts, are usually wrong.

The Track Record No One Promotes

Each year, strategists publish projected returns for the year ahead. Put them side by side and you get a colorful collage of potential “futures” often spanning double-digit differences in expected returns.

And yet, year after year, the actual market return tends to land well outside the average forecast. Why? Markets don’t cooperate with guesses. The chart below displays the median forecast over the past eight years and the actual market returns. Almost every year the market return differs from the median prediction by 15-20%. Yes. 15-20%. The range of outcomes is almost double the average historical annual return of 10%! 

Why Forecasters Miss the Mark

Even the best models can’t anticipate the unpredictable forces that shape markets. Sudden tariff announcements, geopolitical surprises, technological innovations, shifts in interest rates, or global health events can all impact markets in unpredictable ways.

None of these show up in the glossy prediction presentations at the start of the year. Remember, markets move on new information, and new information, by definition, hasn’t been forecast.

What moves stocks is not what experts expect — it’s what they couldn’t expect.

Therefore, investors should focus on what they can control and let markets work for them through the unpredictability. 

At Hill Investment Group, this is the core of our philosophy — Take the Long View. Instead of reacting to forecasts, we help clients anchor to what actually drives success:

• broad diversification
• Minimizing expenses and taxes
  
• disciplined rebalancing
  
• evidence-based decision-making
  
• patience through inevitable volatility
  

These principles have proven far more reliable than trying to anticipate where the S&P 500 will end next December.