Last week, Blackrocks CEO and Chairman Larry Fink published his annual letter to investors, and the timing could not be more instructive. It arrives at a moment of high market uncertainty, as the Middle East conflict disrupts and rocks the business world. Yet rather than adding to the noise, Fink’s letter does the opposite. While the timing coincides with volatile global financial markets, Fink attempts to cut through the noise to identify opportunities and trends that can help investors build wealth.
“I hear it from nearly every client, nearly every leader, nearly every person I talk to: they’re more anxious about the economy than any time in recent memory. I understand why. But we have lived through moments like this before. And somehow, in the long run, we figure things out,” he writes. That statement alone is worth pausing on.
The letter is the work of someone who has earned the right to be heard on these matters. BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world, with $14.041 trillion in assets under management at the end of December 2025. Founded in 1988, BlackRock has grown into this position through mergers, innovation, and adaptability, expanding from $69 billion in assets under management in 1995 to $13.5 trillion in Q3 2025, representing a 19% compound annual growth rate. That is not a firm built on luck or short-term thinking. It is a firm built on exactly the discipline Fink is advocating.
The central question his letter invites investors to ask themselves is a profoundly simple one: why are you investing in the first place? Is it to fund a pension, cover school fees, purchase a second home, or simply build a financial cushion? These are long-term objectives, and they demand a long-term approach. Yet in the current environment, that approach is harder to maintain than ever.
The mathematics of patience are compelling and ought to be revisited regularly. A $100 investment in the S&P 500 in 2006, held through to today, would have delivered a return of approximately 679%, or 10.81% per year, beating inflation for an inflation-adjusted return of around 380% cumulatively. That $100 would today be worth approximately $779. In the two decades spanning that investment, markets endured the Global Financial Crisis, the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, the COVID pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the current Middle East conflict. During the housing market crash and Great Recession alone, the S&P 500 fell over 40%, leaving investors temporarily holding around $590 of their original $1,000. The investors who stayed the course were handsomely rewarded. Those who panicked were not.
Buffett’s record makes the same argument with even greater force. A $100 investment in Berkshire Hathaway at the start of 1965 would be worth roughly $6.1 million by the end of 2025, with Berkshire compounding at 19.7% annually, nearly twice the S&P 500’s 10.5%. Since 1965, Berkshire stock has generated a compound annual growth rate of almost 20% versus 10% for the S&P 500. That extraordinary record was built not on market timing, but on identifying quality businesses and holding them with conviction through cycles that repeatedly threatened to shake weaker hands out of their positions.
One additional dimension of Fink’s letter deserves attention. Rather than a traditional 60/40 split between stocks and bonds, Fink argues investors should consider diversifying into private market assets, a mix he calls 50/30/20 across stocks, bonds, and private assets such as infrastructure and real estate. He also highlights that more capital is sitting idle than at any point in his career, with roughly $25 trillion parked in banks and money market funds in the US alone. That is capital not working hard enough for the long-term goals its owners have set themselves.
The current geopolitical turbulence will pass. It always does. Recession fears, market corrections, and headline crises have appeared with regularity throughout history, and the investors who emerged strongest were those who resisted the impulse to act on short-term anxiety. The S&P 500 has historically recovered from market downturns, and staying invested for the long term helps weather short-term volatility.
Fink and Buffett are not naïve optimists. They are two of the most analytically rigorous investors of the modern era, and both arrive at the same conclusion: time in the market, not timing the market. That principle is simple to state and genuinely difficult to live by. But the numbers make an unanswerable case for it.
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