In this month’s video message, Mike Brady, founder of Generosity Wealth Management, reflects on his 34 years in the financial industry—an impressive span covering more than 15,000 trading days. Drawing from this wealth of experience, Mike shares four guiding principles that have remained constant through every market cycle: define your goals, understand your time horizon, practice discipline, and manage your emotions.
As he discusses current market trends and the normalization he’s seeing, Mike emphasizes the importance of avoiding emotional reactions to short-term events. Instead, he encourages viewers to stay focused on long-term goals and to approach their financial lives with clarity and calm.
This video is both a market update and a mindset check—a reminder that true financial success is less about reacting and more about steady, purposeful planning.
Transcript
Mike Brady with Generosity Wealth Management, a comprehensive full-service financial services firm headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. It is May 2025, Spring. You can certainly feel it outside. Hopefully, you’ve spent a lot of time in this beautiful sun if you’re here in Colorado if you’re outside of Colorado. Hopefully, it’s wonderful in spring weather, wherever you are.
So, I want to talk a little bit about current market conditions, but before that, I want to provide the context. I want to tell a story about my experience kind of. And I’ve been doing this for, you know, meeting with clients for 34 years now. I happened to put it into the computer because I was curious the other day, how many trading days, you know, market days that has been. And that’s been 15,000 out days, 15,000 trading days since I started in August 1991.
That is 55,000, almost 56,000 trading hours, which is unbelievable. And I share that with you because I was meeting with someone a month or two ago, and they said, “Mike, you’re completely calm. I joked with them that I have ice for blood. And that’s because I have seen an awful lot. In my 34 years of working with clients in differing environments, I can sit here and point out how it’s different this year and how there’s something to be concerned about. If you’re optimistic, there’s something to be optimistic about. If you’re negative or pessimistic, there’s always something to be pessimistic about. And I go with the flow. It leads me to some of my Mike Brady truisms as I see it, which is how do you be successful as it relates to your life and to your investments and to your whole financial future. And I’m going to give you some of my thoughts here.
The first one is to clearly define what you’re going towards. What is your financial goal? What is your life goal? Because before we talk about how to point the boat in the right direction, we gotta know where and what that direction is. Before we row the boat, we have to know where we were going. And being clear about what your goals are, and it is okay to have multiple goals. One of them might be to retire at a certain age or to not outlive your money or pass money to your kids or to your heirs. Another could be to save for your child’s education or grandchild’s education. Each of those have different time frames, which kind of boils down to my second thing.
One is clearly defining your financial goals, and the second is know what the duration or the time horizon is, because that starts to inform how you reach those goals. If you need money next week, that’s considerably different than if you need money 20 or 30 years from now. And both environments are different in how we approach them.
The third thing is discipline, okay? Whether that is, “I want to be disciplined in my income and expenses”, “I want to be disciplined in how I save for retirement”, or “I want to be disciplined in how I withdraw money or saving for retirement. Being in the contribution phase is completely different than being in the withdrawal phase. So whichever way it is, it’s being disciplined in what it is that you are, whatever phase of life that you’re in, treating your life like a business.
The fourth thing that I’ve found is very helpful for someone to be successful is to have control over your emotions. We’re not a bunch of, you know, Star Trek Vulcans with pure logic. We have emotions, but what we don’t do is we don’t let those emotions impact the decisions that we’re making–we (don’t) react emotionally. And I have to tell you, this is where I get very cynical. If you’ve talked with me about your news sources, you have to think about the news sources that you’re consuming, whether that’s reading, listening, or watching TV, whether they are helping you or hurting you. Maybe too much for today’s video, but I have a healthy skepticism because they’re not there to inform you most of the time. They’re there to excite your emotions–many of them. I get my news from various sources, and I read almost entirely. And I can tell even if the reading, if it’s trying to get me all excited and getting, you know, kind of throwing red meat to people who think already like that. Red meat to dogs or to the animals to get everyone all excited–or is it dispassionate? Well, “these are the pros–these are the cons”. I can kind of see this and that. Or is it really trying to persuade you and get you all excited so that you’ll go and do, maybe vote one way or the other or support one thing over another. Be very mindful of that.
I’m going to put somewhere in the newsletter where I get some news sources that I get it from–allsides.com, ground news. These are places that have maybe the same article from the left, the right and the center. So I can sort of see what the truth might be. Optimistic, pessimistic and right down the middle, you know, something that might be a little bit lighter but something that’s more technical. I read an awful lot of economic journals as well and technical analysis so that I can see the actual data, not somebody else’s interpretation of what that data is.
I’m going to pivot here. Now what we’re seeing in the market is kind of a normalization as I see. If you go back to my last couple of videos, my last couple of newsletters, I’ve said you don’t make long term decisions based on short term events. So what someone who is prone to be pessimistic might say is like, “well this short term event is different this time or this is just leading to a long term event, and so this is an early predictor”. My answer would be “maybe, but we don’t know the future”. You’ve got to have some humility. The future is inherently unknown. So what has happened over the last couple of months has been an overreaction in my opinion. When anybody starts talking to me, especially a TV pundit that, “it’s so obvious that we’re going to have a recession in three months, six months, nine months”, I discount it right off the bat.
Nothing is obvious in this world. You always have to look at data, what’s the data telling you? How does this play out in an incredibly complex system which is the world economy, which is also reflected in the stock market. Not only is the stock market filled with a bunch of data of future earnings and past earnings, but it’s also human beings with their expectations and their own biases coming into it. So, I always tell people–let’s take things with a grain of salt, let’s not get too bent out of shape because what I have seen over the years plays out time and time again. I think they say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
We’ve seen certain events in the past, but you know, sometimes it’s very similar, but it’s never the same. Whenever we go into a kind of a military conflict, you’ve always got people “is this the next Vietnam?” or “when are we going to get into a quagmire?” You almost have to wait for that to play out again. And you know, the generals are always fighting the last war.
Whenever there’s bad things that happen in the market, and they will always happen, they have always happened, they’re always trying to explain it by what we saw the last time. And so what I’m here to say is that we have seen this time and time again, multiple data points. I’ve seen it my 34 years, my 15,000 trading days.
One thing that I have seen is that a well diversified portfolio has come back. It has sometimes taken months and quarters. In this case, it certainly does look like it has been incredibly short time. If it continues the way it’s doing when I’m writing this video, it has been incredibly short amount of time for there to be, for to be a recovery.
The bad time in the last three, four years has actually been 2022. That was a reaction to, as I see it, the Inflation Reduction Act and lots of money flowing in at the wrong time. Other interest rate missteps. But we have seen some poor communication, some missteps so far this year of which we have recovered very nicely. And I hope that will continue throughout the year. If it doesn’t, then we will continue to have the discipline, we will keep our duration in mind, and we will keep our emotions in check as we reach our financial goals for you.
303-747-6455 Michael Brady.
One of the reasons why I don’t talk real technical investment analysis is I like to talk about that individualized with specific clients. But I also believe that if you get some of the four that I’ve just talked about, you get those under your belt, that part figured out, the investments — they just support that. They’re almost the least important variable towards reaching your financial goals. If you have the discipline plan, the duration, the financial goal defined and your emotions in check, everything else is good to go.
Mike Brady, 303-747-6455.
You have a great rest of the month. Great June. We’ll talk to you later.