By NITINIVESH | Chartered Wealth Manager
We have all been there. You are catching up with a friend or scrolling through an investment forum, and someone mentions, “My fund is doing brilliantly,” or “This stock has doubled in a year.
A familiar pang of doubt creeps in. You look at your own portfolio, which feels stagnant by comparison, and wonder: Should I have bought that instead?
This is how FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) begins. But according to a recent insight from NITI NIVESH RESEARCH , this doubt doesn’t actually stem from greed. It stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how market performance works.
The core truth? The best always comes with a worst.
The Mirage of Constant Success
When we look at historical charts, we tend to see the mountain peaks—the massive wealth creation, the soaring stock prices, and the funds that beat the benchmark. We see the climb, but we completely overlook the chaos that occurred to get there.
The reality is that every single “best performer” in history has had to survive a catastrophic phase. The Apple Example: Today, Apple is a titan of stability and growth. Yet, there was a time when the stock crashed by nearly 82 percent.
The NVIDIA Story: The darling of the modern tech boom, NVIDIA, once plummeted by around 90 percent during the early-2000s dot-com bust. These aren’t isolated incidents; they are the rule. Different markets, different decades, same story.
Why We Get It Wrong
The human brain is wired to seek patterns and safety. When we see a high-performing asset, we assume it has always been that way. We admire the end result, but we fail to appreciate the sheer resilience required to achieve it.
When you experience a bad phase in your own investments, your instinct is to panic and sell. But if you had sold Apple or NVIDIA during their darkest hours, you would have missed out on the spectacular recovery that followed.
The Takeaway for Your Portfolio
If you want to capture the “best” that the market has to offer, you must be willing to endure the “worst” along the way.
Stop Comparing Peaks: Do not compare your current lows to someone else’s reported highs. You do not know what their portfolio looked like six months or a year ago.
Build for Resilience: Volatility is not a bug in the system; it is a feature. A robust financial plan accounts for market downturns rather than crumbling because of them.
Patience Over Panic: Crashes are painful, but they are also temporary. History shows that the numbers tell a timeless story: comebacks are fueled by the same volatility that causes the crashes.
The next time your favorite fund or stock takes a nosedive, take a deep breath. Remind yourself that you are just witnessing a chapter in a much longer story. The best may be yet to come—but it will require you to hold steady through the storm.