This Time Is Different

By Luke Sullivan on October 28, 2026

Greetings and thank you for reading Cory’s Perspective.

Our boy Maxwell James, aka Max, was born on October 19th and the family is all home together now. If anyone needs a shot of adrenaline, bring a newborn home to a house with a toddler! We’re settling in and I’ll include a photo of Mad Max at the end…but today, my friends, I want to talk about the most recognizable disclaimer in the investment industry: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Do you find it interesting how the investment industry reminds people of this while pointing to the past to create narratives about what they should expect from the future? I think that’s an amusing contradiction. How many times have you seen a financial advisor or someone on CNBC show a chart of S&P 500 performance over the last 40 years with the message being buy the market, stay invested, ignore the noise, and everything will work out?

Does it?

Legendary investor Sir John Templeton warned that the four most dangerous words in investing are “this time is different.” I think I understand what he meant. Investors have a history of convincing themselves that valuations, debt and risk no longer matter because some new technology has changed everything. Think Dutch Tulips, the South Sea Company, Railroads, Internet/dot com, and now AI. On that note, my favorite book I have read about bubbles and financial speculation is called “Devil Take the Hindmost” by Edward Chancellor. Highly recommend it!

Back to the point though, let’s be clear, every time IS different! Interest rates change. So do valuations, technology, and government policy. The companies dominating the stock market change, too. Human nature doesn’t change much, but the circumstances do.

Over the last three weeks, I’ve written about how most of my sixteen-year career in wealth management occurred during an unusual financial environment where money was cheap to borrow, the Fed bought trillions of dollars of bonds, and investors were encouraged to take more risk. During that period, buying the S&P 500 and doing nothing worked well. Index investing exploded in popularity, and many investors got accustomed to the idea that buying the market was all they needed to do.

Let’s pause for a moment and think about what that means. Millions of people putting their investments on autopilot, buying the same index funds that direct more money toward companies that have already become the largest with no judgment about valuations or whether those companies are worth what investors are paying. Just keep buying.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that when trillions of dollars follow indexes weighted toward the largest companies, those companies receive a steady source of investment demand. How much of their valuations reflects business fundamentals and how much reflects the structure of the market? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (pun intended) to understand why getting a company like SpaceX into the major indexes would be attractive. Once included, index funds tracking those indexes become buyers regardless of whether their investors have considered the company’s valuation, if they’ve considered it at all.

Have we reached the point where a successful investment strategy has become an assumption that people stop questioning?

Here’s another contradiction. Why are investors (and the media) terrified of Treasury bonds yielding 5% while investing in businesses that depend on raising money to survive? A Treasury bond held to maturity offers contractual payments, subject to the government’s ability to pay. A business burning through cash needs investors or lenders willing to keep financing it. Those are different risks, especially now that money has a cost again.

Meanwhile, investors are paying high prices for companies building AI infrastructure while businesses tied to housing, timberland and other parts of the economy have struggled. That doesn’t mean the struggling companies are automatically bargains but what if some of the better investment opportunities over the next several years are in the parts of the market everybody has been ignoring?

I don’t know! That’s why I think it’s worth doing the work.

I’ve written plenty about AI, and I believe it has the potential to change the world. It’s already changed it, but technology companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers, purchasing chips and securing electricity. Those investments need to produce returns that justify what shareholders are paying. A great company can be a lousy investment if you pay too much for it. The internet changed the world, too, but that didn’t prevent the Nasdaq from losing roughly three-quarters of its value after the dot-com bubble burst.

This is why I get frustrated with the blanket advice to “just stay invested.” Okay. Invested in WHAT? At what price? With how much risk? For how long? What happens if the market declines 40% during the first few years of retirement while you’re taking withdrawals from the portfolio you spent a lifetime building?

I don’t think people should make changes to their portfolios every time a politician says something stupid or markets have a bad week. But I also don’t believe doing nothing is the right decision simply because it worked in the past.

Now, I want to be clear about something because I don’t want anyone misunderstanding what we do at Falcon Wealth Advisors. We use history when building financial plans. We analyze historical market returns to establish a target rate of return based on each client’s circumstances, spending needs, time horizon and ability to take risk. That target return is a baseline for the financial plan to work. It is NOT a prediction.

Achieving what a client’s financial plan requires is more important than beating the S&P 500 or Nasdaq. Most people I meet aren’t trying to win some competition against an index. They’re trying to retire, stay retired, maintain their lifestyle, help their families and avoid running out of money. That’s what the money is FOR!

I believe active investment management and financial planning are valuable. That doesn’t mean active managers always outperform. Plenty don’t. I think investors deserve someone willing to evaluate what they own, what they’re paying for it, what could go wrong and whether their investments still make sense for their lives.

Markets DO NOT owe us 10% per year. The S&P 500 doesn’t have to outperform everything else forever. The companies that dominated the last fifteen years don’t have to dominate the next fifteen, and something doesn’t become less risky simply because everybody owns it.

After sixteen years in the business, I can say with confidence there should be honesty about uncertainty. History gives us a lot to learn from. It cannot tell us what happens next. I’d rather acknowledge that and prepare for several outcomes than use a forty-year chart to give somebody false confidence.

The last fifteen years happened. We can learn from them. We shouldn’t assume they’re going to happen again.

That’s my perspective.

If you like what you’re reading here, please follow me on Instagram @CoryBittnerKC or Facebook, where I share my perspective almost every day. As always, I welcome and invite feedback. Good, bad, or ugly. Just hit the reply button!