Which Market Strategy Fits Today’s Uncertainty? Matt Explains.
Trade wars. Tariff deadlines. Even nuclear threats showing up in the headlines. If you’ve been feeling unsettled by the news lately, you’re not alone.

In this month’s Matt’s Minutes, Matt Curfman, CFP® and our unofficial furry co-host Oliver walk through a timely comparison of three potential market paths — and how different investment strategies (like buy-and-hold and Smoother Ride) might perform in each.

🎥 Watch Now: The Tale of Three Markets — Which Strategy Holds Up Best?

Prefer to read instead of watch? The full transcript is available below for your convenience.

Buy-and-Hold vs. Smoother Ride: What You Need to Know

Matt breaks down three possible market scenarios:

1. A Long-Term Growth Market
   In this case, buy-and-hold and Smoother Ride both perform well — you’re participating in the upside either way.
2. A Steep Market Decline
   This is where buy-and-hold can hurt the most. Smoother Ride kicks in with downside mitigation, helping protect against catastrophic losses.
3. A V-Shaped Market Recovery
   Fast drops and fast rebounds — emotionally intense for any investor. While buy-and-hold may capture more of the rebound, Smoother Ride offers more stability but may miss the early part of the recovery.

So… What Should You Do?

The short answer: There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Your investment strategy should be based on your personal goals, risk tolerance, and where you are in your retirement journey.

What matters most is understanding the environment you’re in — and how your strategy performs in different types of markets. That’s what we’re here for.

At Richmond Brothers, We Help You Navigate All Three Markets — and Then Some
We believe the right plan allows you to live fearlessly into and beyond retirement — no matter what the headlines say. That’s why we use tools like Smoother Ride to help mitigate risk while still pursuing growth when it makes sense.

Have questions about how your portfolio would hold up in any of these three scenarios? Reach out — we’re here to help.

📩 Email us anytime at questions@richmondbrothers.com
📞 Or schedule a time to chat at richmondbrothers.com

Full Transcript of Video

Download graphs here

Hi everyone this is Matt Curfman and my trusty companion Oliver. We are here for a July edition of Matt’s Minutes being recorded the first week of August 2025. Oliver and I have a lot of updates and also we wanted to basically tell a tale a tale of three different markets. And so there’s been a lot of headlines around tariffs trade wars. There’s been even headlines around you’re seeing the word nuclear or nuclear war being you know if you look in the last month or two so really really very uncertain scary times and yet you have to take that information and say how does that translate to markets how does it translate to investments and your retirement plan. And so I’m going to set Oliver down, but he wanted to say hi to everyone. Thanks, Oliver.

Then I’m going to share my screen here and do a little comparison. Okay, so on my screen, remember I said the tale of three markets. And so I have scenario one, scenario two, scenario three. So in scenario one, I’m also comparing just if you went out and buy and hold the market, and the market could be the S&P, the Dow Jones, the NASDAQ. I want to reiterate, this is not making any recommendation. This is purely educational only. And we’re talking concepts in this video. So, in a growth market, whether you have a buy-and-hold strategy or you have a smoother ride strategy, both perform pretty competitively because really in Smoother Ride, you’re buying the market. And in a buy-and-hold, if you own the market, and again, you can’t directly own the market, but we’re talking about mutual funds that represent the market.

This little dash under here is if you have the Smoother Ride. That’s kind of how the safety nets work. As the market rises, the safety nets do too. So there’s one market. When you’re in a long-term growing market, buy-and-hold or Smoother Ride probably both do fine. If you go down here to Scenario two, where you have just a falling market, big negative things happening. Think about recessionary periods. Think about technology bubble in 2000. Think about September 11th, terrorist attacks. Think about the pandemic. And when you have a largely declining market, and then you say, ‘Am I better to be in buy and hold or Smoother Ride?’ In this case, buy and hold is not typically the place to be.

When you compare the two, Smoother Ride is because then there’s some safety net, so there’s downside mitigation, so that you don’t have I guess how we would describe catastrophic loss. And then the third market, another scenario that can happen in the middle of any of this, is a V-shaped market. The red represents the market dropping, and the green represents the market coming back up. And so under buy and hold, even though this is scary, this scenario probably gets you a better, faster outcome, but you have a lot of emotions along the way. If you’re in Smoother Ride instead, it’s just being a not as good-I put it as in the average or good category. And the reason is, you see this drop where my mouse is, there is a dash kind of partway down this V.

Anywhere between, it could be, let’s just hypothesize and say, between eight and 12% downside in the markets. Typically, you’re going to see the Smoother Ride kick in and safety nets. Now, if the market kept going down like scenario two, you’re already sitting in the sidelines and cash, bonds, and some other assets that aren’t going to keep going down to the market traditionally. If the market, however, reverses course and starts growing back up immediately and Smoother Ride has already gone to safety, we are kind of sitting on the sidelines and missing out on some of that recovery. Now, we’re not missing out forever. Eventually, this upper dash, as algorithms allow, buybacks come back in. So if the market keeps growing from here, whether you had a buy and hold or Smoother Ride, you’re still going to do fine.

Now, in that period, you’re probably going to have done better with the buy and hold. So the question is, We basically pull our crystal balls and say, what is the environment we’re heading into in the future? And the answer is no one really knows. However, if you say, what are we experiencing this year? Here is a map of the S&P, the Dow, and the NASDAQ. Again, no recommendation here, just broad markets. And this is basically a V market. And so when safety nets went in and then all of a sudden tariffs were walked back, 90-day periods were given, grace periods, and we kind of worked through this 90-day window. That allowed markets to kind of come back up. But August 1st came around and that was the deadline for almost all tariffs for all countries.

It’s still a lot of headlines. It’s still causing a lot of concern. And to be quite frank, I don’t know. And we don’t know where the market’s going to go. So relative to your equity positions, your stock holdings, you know, Buy and hold versus having to smooth the ride. One is not better than the other. They perform differently in most environments. If we go back to this and say, okay. Buy and hold has two out of three times it does okay, but there’s a really big one that hurts a lot if the markets were to lose 20, 30, 40, 50%. That would not be fun to go through. So then you’re better off with Smoother Ride. And with Smoother Ride, you get a decent outcome when markets are growing.

You get a decent outcome with safety nets when markets massively decline, and you get an OK outcome when you have a V-shaped market. The question is where do you want to be, and there’s no right or wrong answer to this, so I wanted to add this perspective and hopefully that’s helpful as we kind of navigate what we’re seeing in the markets and as we head further and further into the summer. We are here to help guide you, educate you, and support you. So if you have questions, please reply to this or email us questions@richmondbrothers.com. I’m grateful, and we are all grateful for the opportunity to work with you and help navigate you through all of this, no matter what the world throws in our way. Thank you for being part of Richmond Brothers, and I will continue to keep you updated along with my trusty companion Oliver along the way.

Sources:

Research Reports

YCharts

Please note: Any market index referenced is unmanaged, does not reflect the impact of fees and other expenses and is unable to be invested in.