Many years ago when my sister was planning her wedding, she was flooded with advice and thoughts from everyone involved. It was all well intentioned advice but led to her having a moment of exasperation where she proclaimed “everybody has an opinion!” It quickly became a family mantra and one that was bouncing around in my mind this week!

Over the weekend, a research firm called Citrini published an article called The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis on Substack. It was made available to all (most of their content is behind a paywall) and was written as a fictional memo from the future, painting a “grim picture “doomsday” picture of an AI dominated future. The memo clearly had an impact of markets, driving a sell-off on Monday in the sectors it mentioned (such as software) and the individual companies it targeted (such as DoorDash and American Express).

Later in the week, many investors, market commentators, journalists, and even large scale money managers including Citadel, published their response to the post. Internet sleuths further discovered that the co-author of the Citrini piece was a hedge fund manager with large short positions in the companies/sectors named in the viral memo, leading to some questions of motivation and market manipulation.

By my writing of this post, markets have recovered some of the lost ground and seemingly moved on to the next news story. However, I believe this week is illustrative of a good reminder that echoes what my sister said all those years ago – everybody has an opinion! And in today’s click-bait, 24/7 news cycle, pay to access content world, there are ever increasing conflicted reasons for sharing of opinions. Simply put, not everyone is expressing their views to help you. Often times, it’s to help themselves.

What should you do with all of this? That’s ultimately up to you but my advice is to largely tune it out and pay attention to one well formulated opinion – your own. You know why you are investing. You know what you own and why. You know what return you need to achieve. You know how to endure uncertainty (after all you’ve done it before). You know pessimism sells but optimism prevails. You know the future is uncertain (it always has been). You know staying the course is the best strategy. You know how to be a long-term steward of your wealth.

Feel free to read other views and take in other information. That’s how you learn and form an opinion in the first place. Just don’t allow the daily noise to distract you from the opinion that really matters – your own.

Onward we go,