The stock market is at an all-time high, and investors don’t know what to feel.
If you are invested, you may be dreading the drop that comes next.
If you are on the sidelines, you may be kicking yourself for missing the rally.
Either way, the flood of information isn’t helping.
Every day brings a fresh barrage of headlines — tariffs, interest rates, earnings surprises, geopolitical tensions — each one dressed up to sound urgent.
The result?
Your mind gets jumbled.
Anxiety builds.
And in that fog, you are more likely to make a decision you will regret.
If you think the anxiety is all in your head, consider this: the MSCI US Index has recorded 70 days of swings greater than 1.5 per cent so far in 2026, on an annualised basis.
That’s the most since 2020, when the pandemic sent markets into a tailspin with 71 such days.
For perspective, between 2010 and 2019, there was only an average of around seven such days per year — in other words, volatility today is 10 times more.
Ergo, it’s real, not imagined.
Here’s the thing: the answer is not more information.
You already have plenty of that.
What you need are better questions.
I’d like to share three questions that can help you cut through the noise and regain clarity over your investments.
Question 1: What do I know, what don’t I know, and what can’t I know?
When worry takes over, everything blends into one undifferentiated cloud of fear and confusion.
Tariffs. Recession. AI disruption. Rising costs. It all feels equally threatening and equally urgent.
But it’s not.
The next time you feel overwhelmed, try this: take out a pen and paper, and sort your concerns into three buckets.
The first bucket is what you know.
These are the facts about your investments which you can verify: the company’s revenue, its competitive position, its track record through past downturns.
Write them down.
The second bucket is what you know you don’t know.
Perhaps, you are unsure how a new regulation will affect the business, or whether a competitor’s product will gain traction.
These are legitimate uncertainties, but they are identifiable.
You can monitor them.
The third bucket is what you cannot know ahead of time.
Will there be another pandemic?
A financial crisis?
A black swan event that no one sees coming?
These are the unknown unknowns, and no amount of research will reveal them.
Here’s what this exercise does: it shrinks the cloud.
Once you sort your worries on paper, you will often find that the things keeping you up at night fall into that third bucket – that is, the things no one can predict or control.
Meanwhile, the things you can control – your research, your position sizing, your cash reserves – become clearer.
If the known unknowns make you uncomfortable, there are practical steps you can take.
You can hold more cash.
You can space out your purchases.
You can reduce your position size.
The point is, clarity comes from separating what you can act on from what you cannot.
Question 2: If valuation didn’t matter, what stock would you buy?
This question sounds almost too simple.
But that’s precisely why it works.
In a noisy market, investors get pulled in every direction.
You may find yourself chasing stocks that are falling because they look cheap, or avoiding stocks that are rising because they look expensive.
In the process, you lose sight of something fundamental: what do you actually want to own?
Strip away the share price.
Ignore the price-to-earnings ratio.
Forget about whether the stock is at a 52-week high or low.
Now ask yourself: which business would I want to be a part-owner of?
This question forces you to think about quality: the strength of the business, its competitive advantages, its ability to grow over years and decades.
Once you have that answer, something shifts.
You are no longer reacting to the market.
You are waiting for the market to give you what you want, at a price you are willing to pay.
The daily noise becomes easier to tune out because you now have a filter.
Headlines that don’t relate to your target business simply fall away.
You stop reacting to every piece of news and start waiting with purpose.
That’s a very different posture from chasing headlines.
Question 3: If you discovered your holdings today, would you buy them?
This question is for the stocks you already own.
As investors, we are anchored to the price we paid.
A stock that has doubled feels like a winner.
A stock that has halved feels like a mistake.
But neither feeling tells you anything about the business today.
Here’s a better approach: imagine you have never seen the stock before.
You are reading about the company for the first time: its products, its financials, its prospects.
Would you buy it?
If the answer is yes, then the stock’s past performance, whether up or down, is irrelevant.
You own a business you believe in.
If the answer is no, then you have a different kind of clarity.
And it has nothing to do with the price you paid.
This exercise strips away the emotional baggage of your entry price and lets you see your portfolio with fresh eyes.
Get Smart: Clarity is your edge
In a market flooded with data, opinions, and noise, clarity is the most underrated advantage an investor can have.
The three questions above won’t tell you what the market will do next.
Nobody can.
But they will help you figure out what you think, what you want, and what you are comfortable with — and that is something you can control.
In my experience, the investors who do well over the long term are not the ones with the best information.
They are the ones who know their own minds.
So, the next time the market gets loud, don’t reach for more data.
Reach for a pen and paper instead.
The headlines feel worse than the market itself.
So what are experienced investors actually doing right now? Our FREE report reveals how to position your portfolio amid volatility. Download it for free here.
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Disclosure: Chin Hui Leong does not own any of the shares mentioned.
