It doesn’t matter what other people do with their money.
That’s none of my business.
For a lot of people, that’s a hard idea to accept.
They worry about what their neighbors own. They think about what their coworkers are invested in. They obsess over what “most people” have in their portfolios.
They carry all of that around with them, every day.
That sounds exhausting.
I stopped caring a long time ago.
That doesn’t mean I’m insensitive, or that I root against anyone.
It simply means I don’t make investment decisions based on how they might affect someone else’s portfolio.
Markets don’t care about your neighbor’s 401(k). They don’t care about your politics, your feelings, or what makes the evening news uncomfortable to watch.
They only care about price, trends, and probabilities.
I learned that lesson the hard way.
Experience taught me that following my plan matters more than following the crowd, and that letting go of what other people do with their money is one of the most important steps I ever took as an investor.
Once you understand that, everything else gets easier.
Follow Your Plan
I run my strategies without worrying about whether the outcome is good for someone else’s portfolio.
If I’m long shares of Tesla (TSLA) and my neighbor happens to be short the stock, there’s no conflict. I know exactly who I’m rooting for.
If I’m sitting on a lot of cash, or positioned mostly in defensive stocks and alternatives like metals or bonds, that usually means I’m betting that stock prices are going to fall.
And, if that’s the bet, why would I hope for anything else? Why should “other people’s 401(k)s” factor into my decision making at all?
Markets don’t work that way. If I believe stock prices are headed lower, it would make no sense to root against my own position.
My job is to execute my plan as well as I can, not to manage the emotions or outcomes of other investors.
I Wasn’t Always This Way
It feels like yesterday, but throughout most of 2008 I was net short stocks. At the office, I earned the nickname “Permabear.”
Every morning, I’d turn on the TV hoping for bad news. I was short. The worse things got, the more money I made for myself and my clients.
Back then, I still watched basic cable. I’d flip on the business channels rooting for stock futures to be down, jobless claims to be higher, and another major American bank to disappear into Chapter 11.
That was hard on me.
I was young, just 26 years old, and I didn’t know any better. I felt guilty about the thoughts I was having. The world looked like it was falling apart in real time, and my positioning meant I benefited when things got worse.
The last thing I wanted then, and the last thing I want now, is for anyone to get hurt or suffer through hard times. These people never did anything to me. Even if they had, I don’t root for bad outcomes for others.
I want people to be happy. I want them to win. I want them to feel joy.
But markets don’t care about any of that.
And learning to separate human empathy from investment decisions was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.
You Gotta Get Yours
Fast forward to the fall of 2016. I was coming off the most bearish stretch I’d experienced since the Great Financial Crisis.
If you knew me during 2015 and early 2016, you probably would’ve assumed I really was a permabear. That period was brutal.
But by the summer and fall of 2016, the data had changed. Completely. I was as bullish as I’ve ever been.
Then Trump won the presidential election.
Sentiment couldn’t have been worse. The narrative was that markets were about to crash and volatility was guaranteed.
I was living in Northern California at the time, right in the Bay Area, with a front-row seat to the anger, panic, and frustration from investors and non-investors alike.
None of that mattered.
I already had the battle scars. I’d learned how to tune out the noise and trust the data. I couldn’t control the fact that other people were moving to cash and shorting stocks when the evidence clearly pointed the other way.
What other people were doing with their money was none of my business. That wasn’t my problem.
I had to get mine.
And, sure enough, stocks didn’t fall in 2017. It turned into one of the greatest and least volatile years in stock market history.
The mistakes I made in 2008, worrying too much about others and feeling responsible for their outcomes, made it much easier to stay focused and unemotional in 2016.
2025 Was Like 2017
We saw a similar setup this spring.
A lot of investors were bearish on equities and calling for a major pullback, even though we were coming out of a bear market just two years earlier.
People were angry about tariffs, worried about wars, and choosing to move to cash or short stocks. We were doing the opposite. We got aggressively long.
What other people were doing wasn’t our problem. This is the market. Our job is to focus on our own positioning, our own risk, and our own plan.
I understand why people get caught up in it. I’ve been there.
But caring too much about what others do is a waste of energy. You can’t control it, and it won’t make you a better investor.
So I teach. I share exactly what I’m doing with my own money in real time, and I hope someone out there listens.
That’s all you can do.
Follow your plan. Do the best you can for yourself, your family, your clients, and anyone who depends on you.
After that, let it go.
Other investors have different time horizons, different risk tolerances, and different objectives.
Outside of using their positioning as sentiment data, it doesn’t matter what they do.
Their money is their business.
Yours is yours.
Stay sharp,
JC Parets, CMT
Founder, TrendLabs