2026 Annual Wealth Management Letter
Once a year, we want to step back from the details, from the spreadsheets, the projections, the quarterly noise, and write about the ideas that actually shape long-term outcomes — not just in markets, but in life. Welcome to our first Annual Wealth Management Letter.
Wealth management, as we practice it, sits at the intersection of investing, planning, behavior, and purpose. When those elements point in the same direction, money does what it is supposed to do. When they do not, even a well-funded plan can become a source of stress rather than freedom.
Each year, this letter will be built around a single theme. This year’s emerged naturally from conversations we have been having with clients, with each other, and with the markets themselves. We hope you enjoy and appreciate the read.
These two ideas belong together. Because timing is often unknowable, in markets and in life, the only compass that holds is your own. Playing your own game is not a retreat from ambition. It is what remains when certainty is unavailable.
We approach this from two directions: markets and investing, as well as personal planning; and we don’t shy away from the harder questions about how we spend the time and money we have worked to accumulate.
Read on for:
Part One: Markets and Investing by Dustin Barr, Chair, Investment Committee
Part Two: Financial Planning and Life by Walker Shelton, Chair, Financial Planning Committee
Part One · Markets and Investing
The Clocks Have No Hands
Warren Buffett recently stepped back from the helm of Berkshire Hathaway. For many investors, this feels like more than a retirement; it marks the end of a chapter defined by discipline, patience, and a stubborn refusal to confuse investment with speculation.
In his 2000 shareholder letter, written at the height of the dot-com bubble, Buffett offered a metaphor that has stayed with us:
“The giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.”
Warren Buffett · Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter, 2000
That image of the handless clock is the title of this letter and the frame through which we want to approach the current moment. It is not a warning against optimism. It is a reminder that markets do not announce their turns. Excess rarely identifies itself. The shift from investment to speculation tends to become visible only after it has already happened.
We are, once again, in a familiar room.
Playing Your Own Game in Markets
Buffett’s deeper lesson, the one beneath all the aphorisms, is that successful investing has little to do with keeping pace with others. Your time horizon, your risk tolerance, your actual financial objectives: these matter far more than what the market did last quarter or what a neighbor claims to have made on a single position.
Speculative episodes are dangerous precisely because they make that lesson feel irrelevant. When gains appear effortless and narratives feel inevitable, the pull toward abandoning one’s own process is real. Rational thinking gives way to envy and the fear of being left behind. That is the environment in which the current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence is unfolding.
AI Will Change the World
This is not in dispute. AI is a genuine general-purpose technology, the kind that comes along rarely and reshapes the economy in ways that are difficult to fully anticipate. It will change how we write code, discover drugs, manage supply chains, and interact with information. Entire industries will be reconfigured.
One question worth sitting with is not whether AI matters. It is who captures the economic benefit, and whether today’s market prices already assume not just success, but something closer to perfection.
Nvidia and the AI Trade
No company embodies the current moment more than Nvidia. Its chips are essential infrastructure. Its revenue growth has been extraordinary, its margins exceptional, and its market capitalization has expanded at a pace rarely seen at that scale.
It is a remarkable business. But investment returns are not determined by the quality of a company alone. They are determined by the relationship between what a business will actually earn over time and what you paid to own it today. Even genuinely great companies can be poor long-term investments when expectations leave no room for reality to disappoint.
That risk is compounded by concentration. The top seven stocks in the S&P 500 now represent a historically large share of the index. Roughly forty companies, the core of what JPMorgan’s Michael Cembalest has called the “AI trade,” have absorbed a disproportionate share of capital and attention. Some will justify it. Most, history suggests, will not.
History Doesn’t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes
The 1920s · Radio and Electrification
RCA rose more than 200-fold between 1921 and 1929. From its peak, it fell over 95%. Radio reshaped the world. RCA shareholders did not participate in what followed.
The 1960s · Computers and Automation
IBM was considered untouchable. At its late-1960s peak it traded at multiples that assumed infinite rapid growth. Earnings grew over the next decade. The stock went nowhere as valuations compressed.
The Early 1970s · The Nifty Fifty
A generation of investors believed certain companies were simply too good to sell at any price — Polaroid, Xerox, Avon. Many were outstanding businesses. Investors who bought near peak valuations spent the better part of a decade recovering.
The Late 1990s · The Internet
Amazon, Google, and eBay became extraordinary companies. The Nasdaq still fell nearly 80% between 2000 and 2002. Cisco, briefly the most valuable company in the world, took twenty years to recover its prior high.
The pattern holds across each era: a technology with genuine and lasting impact; early leaders that seemed unassailable; a flood of capital; valuations that assumed the best case would become the only case; and then a reset. The technology survived. The excess did not.
Capital, Competition, and Compression
High returns attract capital. Capital creates competition. Competition compresses margins. The investment flowing into data centers, semiconductors, energy infrastructure, and software platforms today will, over time, reduce the scarcity that currently supports elevated returns. Growth may remain attractive, just not as attractive as the most optimistic projections already embedded in prices.
Buffett was never warning against progress. He was observing that investors have a persistent habit of treating technological inevitability as investment inevitability. They are not the same thing.
Participating Without Losing the Plot
None of this is an argument for avoiding AI exposure. Sitting out entirely would be its own mistake. But participation should be considered: broad rather than concentrated, anchored in valuation rather than narrative, connected to long-term objectives rather than short-term momentum. There will be stretches where this approach lags. That is the cost of not dancing until the last possible second. It is also what makes it possible to still be in the room when the music starts again.
Part Two · Financial Planning and Life
Money as a Tool, Not a Scoreboard
The forces that pull investors into speculative excess show up in personal financial life too. Comparison, deferred decisions, goals that were never consciously chosen — these are not problems unique to markets. They follow us into how we work, spend, save, and measure a life.
In past letters, we have drawn on thinkers who shaped how we approach investing — Bogle, Marks, Munger, Buffett. Another voice has become increasingly influential in how we think about the planning side of our work: Morgan Housel. His newest book, The Art of Spending Money, sits alongside The Psychology of Money and Same as Ever in our office lobby. If you have visited, you have likely seen them and may have walked away with a copy.
Morgan’s gift is making visible what we already sense but rarely say aloud. Money, left unattended, becomes a scoreboard. It starts measuring things it was never meant to measure. The three stories below are drawn from conversations we have regularly — not with any single family, but with many.
Story One
Running Hard, Standing Still
Some of the families we work with have, by any measure, already won. The net worth statement is solid. The plan works. The finish line is within reach. And yet the pace does not slow. The mountain home stays a recurring topic. More time with family remains something that will happen soon. This is not a planning failure. It is something closer to a permissions problem. Without a clear answer to the question of what they are actually trying to achieve, the ambient default takes hold — keep building, keep deferring, keep moving. The metrics of someone else’s success quietly stand in for their own. The math, in these situations, is rarely the obstacle. The harder work is deciding that the life they want is the one worth optimizing for, and then letting the plan say so plainly.
Story Two
The Number That Never Arrives
Most people carry a number in their head — a portfolio balance, an income level, a net worth — some threshold past which money stops being the central concern. Get there, and clarity follows. The pressure lifts.
The number tends to move. Not from greed, but because accumulation, once it becomes habitual, generates its own momentum. The rules are clear, the progress is visible, and the scoreboard is easy to read. The deeper questions — what is this actually for, what would be enough — are harder to measure, so they get deferred again. What we have found is that the families who break this pattern tend to do it the same way: they stop asking how much and start asking what for. That shift, from a number to a purpose, changes the conversation entirely. And often, it turns out they were already there.
Story Three
The Gift and the Burden
Most parents arrive at some version of the same question: how much is too much? They want to give their children a better start, more opportunity, less struggle. The instinct is generous and entirely understandable. But wealth transferred without intention can become something other than a gift. It can quietly become a measure of parental love, a source of tension between siblings, a replacement for the struggle that builds judgment and resilience. The inheritance begins to play the game on behalf of the next generation, removing the friction that might have made them capable of playing their own. The families who tend to find peace in these conversations are the ones who stop trying to optimize the transfer and start thinking about what they actually want to pass on: not just assets, but a way of thinking about money. The most lasting inheritance is rarely the amount. It is the example.
Part Two, Continued
The Clocks Have No Hands — In Life, Too
Buffett’s metaphor belongs to markets, but it describes something much broader. In our planning work, we sit with people who are equally convinced they will recognize the right moment — to slow down, to spend more freely, to have the difficult conversation, to stop postponing the life they have been building toward.
After the next milestone. When things settle down. Once the kids are through school. When the time feels right.
The time rarely announces itself.
There is perhaps no tension we encounter more consistently than the one between spending now and saving for a later that may arrive on entirely different terms.
It presents as a financial question. It is not. It is a question about what a life is for — and whether the resources accumulated to support that life are actually being used in its service.
The instinct to save, defer, and protect is not wrong. It reflects real discipline and builds real security. But applied without examination, it has a cost that does not show up on any balance sheet. The trip that never gets taken. The decade of weekends spent working toward a retirement that arrives with less health, less mobility, or fewer of the people you planned to share it with. We have sat with families in exactly that position. The money was there. The window had closed.
Life is short — and that is not a cliché when you are watching someone reckon with it in real time.
The risk of running out of money deserves serious attention. So does the risk of running out of time while the money waits for a permission slip that was never required.
The families who navigate this well are not the ones who spend recklessly or save obsessively. They are the ones who ask the harder questions with enough honesty to act on the answers. What am I saving this for? If the window were shorter than I assume, what would I do differently? What does spending well actually look like for me?
Playing your own game, in markets and in life, starts with being willing to answer those questions on your own terms, before circumstances answer them for you.
One Theme · One Philosophy
Across market cycles and kitchen table conversations, the thread is the same. Money works when it serves a purpose you have chosen. There is no universal answer to how to invest or spend well. But there is a starting point that never changes: knowing what game you are playing, and having the honesty to play it on your own terms.
The clocks have no hands. Set your own.
Warmly,
Verum Partners
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