I Don’t Know (And Neither Does Warren Buffett)
The most honest thing I can tell you about the stock market.
People ask me all the time.
Friends. Acquaintances. Someone I haven’t talked to in two years slides into the DMs.
What stock should I buy right now?
They figure because I write a markets newsletter, I’m sitting on some secret. Some edge. Like I’ve got a Bloomberg terminal and a direct line to someone at the Fed and I’ve been quietly sitting on the answer this whole time, just waiting to be asked.
Every January I publish my three stocks for the year. (you can see this year’s picks here) Every year, without fail, at least a few people read that and think there's a fourth stock, the real one, that I'm keeping to myself. The private pick. The one I'm actually buying.
There isn’t.
Here’s the truth: I don’t know.
And neither does Warren Buffett. Neither does your brother-in-law. Neither does the guy on CNBC with the really confident tie. Neither does the hedge fund manager with the $50 billion AUM and the research team of 200 people and the satellite data tracking parking lot traffic at retail stores.
If any of us actually knew, not guessed, not estimated, not modeled, what the market was going to do, we wouldn’t be here.
We’d be on a private island, completely off the grid, sleeping in, surfing, swimming, and eating whatever our private chef decided to make that day. We would have bought the right thing, cashed out, and disappeared.
Nobody’s on that island.
We’re all guessing. Some of us just guess better.
Every day, market participants from retail investors to trillion-dollar institutions take the information available to them and make their best educated guess about what comes next. That’s it. That’s the whole game.
The difference between a good investor and a bad one isn’t access to some hidden truth. It’s the quality of the process. How disciplined is your research? How well do you manage risk when you’re wrong? How honest are you with yourself when a thesis breaks down? Good investors aren’t right more often because they know more. They’re right more often because they’re more rigorous about how they guess, and quicker to admit when they’ve guessed wrong.
Yes, Wall Street strategists have more data, more charts, and more computing power than most of us will ever see. And they still don’t know. Every December, the biggest banks on the planet publish their year-end S&P 500 price targets. Every year, the range of those targets is enormous. Every year, most of them are wrong. Some years, nearly all of them are wrong in the same direction at the same time, which is its own kind of humbling.
Think about it this way. Who predicted the pandemic? Who predicted that the stock market would hit all-time highs in the middle of it? Who predicted the selloff that followed, or the pace of the recovery, or inflation running hotter than it had in 40 years?
Nobody called it. Some people got pieces of it right. Most didn’t. And the ones who did often got the next thing wrong.
The risks to a market are simply endless. Inflation. Fed policy. Interest rates. Supply chains. Political instability. Geopolitical shocks. Currency crises. Credit stress. A pandemic nobody saw coming. A war that moves oil prices over 30% in a week. You can keep adding to that list forever, because the world keeps inventing new ones. There are just too many variables, and too many of them are completely outside anyone’s control.
Anyone who tells you they know, not thinks, not believes, not expects, knows what the market is going to do is full of it.
Right now, in March 2026, “nobody knows” has never felt more true.
The Fed decides today. This afternoon, Jerome Powell steps to the podium and the dot plot gets released. It will look precise and authoritative. Sixteen Fed officials, each with a projection, neatly plotted on a chart. Wall Street analysts will parse every word of the statement. Financial media will spend two hours dissecting a 45-minute press conference.
And yet, oil has spiked sharply on Middle East tensions. Inflation is running hotter than expected. Growth is slowing. The Fed chair transition is in limbo. Rate cut expectations have been pushed from June all the way back to October. Equity markets are pricing in one scenario. The bond market is pricing in another. They can’t both be right. One of them is going to be surprised.
The dot plot will look authoritative. It isn’t. It’s sixteen people’s best educated guesses, dressed up in a grid.
Nobody knows. Everyone has a model. The models disagree.
And that’s before you account for the thing nobody’s modeling yet. The next shock that hasn’t happened. The one that will feel obvious in hindsight and impossible to have seen coming in the moment. There’s always one. We just don’t know what it is.
That’s not a failure. That’s simply the market.
Four quotes worth keeping on your wall:
“In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.” — Benjamin Graham
“In all my 60 years in the stock market, I never found anyone whose opinion of what the stock market would do next week or next month was worth heeding.” — John Templeton
“I am certainly not going to predict what the stock market is going to do in the next year or two, since I don’t have the faintest idea.” — Warren Buffett
“You never can predict the economy. You can’t predict the stock market.” — Peter Lynch
These aren’t just humble disclaimers. They’re hard-won wisdom from people who spent their entire careers in the markets. People with more information, more experience, and more resources than anyone reading this newsletter. And every single one of them landed in the same place. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
If that’s where Benjamin Graham ended up, you should probably be suspicious of anyone a lot less accomplished who sounds a lot more certain.
So what do you do with that?
You stop looking for certainty where there isn’t any. You stop trusting the guest on TV who says this is “a guarantee.” You stop treating the December price target from a big bank like it’s a forecast and not a guess with a suit on.
You get comfortable with the idea that investing is inherently probabilistic. You’re not trying to be right every time, that’s not possible. You’re trying to make high-quality decisions with incomplete information, manage your downside when you’re wrong, and let your winners run when you’re right. Over time, that process compounds. The need to know doesn’t.
And the next time someone asks you what stock to buy, or the next time someone on TV tells you this one is a lock, remember where the greatest investors of all time landed after a lifetime in the game.
Nobody knows. We’re all just making our best guess.
Next time someone tells you otherwise, that they know, that this one is a lock, that this trade is guaranteed, smile, nod, and then go do your own homework. Because what they’re really telling you is that they either haven’t been doing this long enough to be humbled yet, or they want something from you.
The island isn’t real. Never was.
Now stop asking me what to buy.
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