This Time Isn’t Different

• The full permanent premium return of mainstream equities is available only to long-term investors who are prepared to ride out the market’s frequent, sometimes significant but always temporary declines.
• Investors who panic out of the market and go to cash during declines doom themselves to long-term regret.
• This book lays out a system for training clients, from the very first day of the relationship, to regard the permanent returns and the temporary declines as an inseparable package.
• The failing investor’s death song – “This Time Is Different” – is accurate only in the sense that the narrow specifics of every “crisis” are different, and therefore shocking to the point of panic. The dot-com implosion was entirely different from the Global Financial Crisis, which was completely different from COVID. Every serious bear market comes out of deep left field.
• But America’s most successful companies work through and around every crisis, ultimately innovating their way to new heights of earnings, dividends and values.
• This book says that clients can be systematically trained to see themselves as patient long-term owners of great companies rather than as helpless victims of the stock market’s “volatility.”
• The depth of the clients’ trust in their advisor ultimately governs whether they come through bear markets unscathed. This book is, above all, a rigorous system for developing that trust.

— Nick Murray