The noise is loud. It always has been.

Let me ask you something. Cast your mind back — not centuries, just a decade or two. What was the crisis that was going to end everything?

In 2020, it was a global pandemic that shut down the world economy in a matter of weeks. In 2022, it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, surging energy prices, and the most aggressive rate-hiking cycle in a generation. In 2018, it was trade wars and the prospect of a US-China economic decoupling. In 2015, it was Greece’s potential default, China’s stock market crash, and collapsing oil prices. In 2008, it was the entire global financial system.

Each of those moments felt, in real time, like the one that was genuinely different. Each of them generated enormous noise. Each of them passed — not without pain, not without real consequences for real people — but they passed.

What’s striking, when you look at the data calmly, is just how consistent this pattern is. Since 2015 alone, markets have experienced fourteen distinct corrections — some modest, some severe. The causes read like a tour of modern anxiety: Iran wars, AI disruption fears, tariffs, trade wars, global recession fears, a pandemic, the Ukraine invasion, inflation, rising rates, credit turmoil. Every single one of them felt, in the moment, like the beginning of something catastrophic.

And after every single one of them, markets recovered.

Here’s what genuinely unsettles me about the current environment — and I want to be honest about this, because I think pretending it doesn’t exist would be dishonest.

The language coming out of Washington right now is strange. Strip away the context of who is saying it, and listen only to the words: territorial expansion, economic coercion, the assertion that neighbouring countries are essentially extensions of a larger nation’s rightful sphere of influence. If you removed the American accent, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to Putin justifying his “military exercise” in Ukraine, or China’s position on the South China Sea or Taiwan.

The US has always thrown its weight around. But there’s something qualitatively different about openly musing about absorbing Canada as a 51st state, or suggesting Greenland is a matter of national security. The norms of the post-war international order — however imperfect they were — at least provided a shared language of restraint. That language seems to be eroding.

So yes, in that narrow sense, something is different. Populism is reshaping the western democracies from the inside. The autocratic powers — Russia and China — remain nuclear-armed, globally influential, and deeply resistant to the kind of rules-based order that most of us assumed was permanent. The world is genuinely multipolar in a way it hasn’t been since before the Second World War.

And yet.

We have lived through multipolarity before. We have lived through the Cold War, through the Cuban Missile Crisis — arguably the closest humanity has ever come to nuclear exchange — through proxy wars, through the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the rise of China. Civilisation, commerce, and markets survived all of it. Not unscathed. Not without loss. But they survived, and they grew.

The Cold War is actually a useful parallel here. For forty years, two nuclear superpowers spent enormous resources on posturing, threats, and ideological competition. The world felt perpetually on the edge. And yet within that tension, human beings continued to build companies, raise families, save for retirement, and invest in the future. The lesson wasn’t that the threat wasn’t real. It was that the correct response to an uncertain world is not paralysis — it’s prudent, patient action.

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve come across recently was on the Rachman Review podcast, featuring retired US Secretary of Defense General Lloyd Austin. The discussion touched on something that I think gets lost in the noise around military conflict: warfare itself is being transformed.

Large standing armies are no longer the decisive factor they once were. Ukraine — a country of 44 million people with a fraction of Russia’s military budget — has been able to hold off one of the world’s nuclear superpowers for years, in large part because of asymmetric technology: drones, precision weaponry, electronic warfare. Iran, similarly, has demonstrated the capacity to strike US assets using relatively inexpensive drone technology. The era of conventional military dominance — where the biggest army wins — is giving way to something more complex, more distributed, and frankly harder to predict.

What does any of this have to do with your investments? Simply this: the countries making the most noise are often the least likely to follow through. Posturing has become the weapon of choice precisely because it’s cheap, it dominates headlines, and it creates fear without requiring action. If the disruption is primarily psychological — designed to unsettle rather than to actually destroy — then the correct response is not to make permanent financial decisions based on temporary noise.

There’s another dimension to this that I think is underappreciated: we are living through an unprecedented assault on our cognitive bandwidth.

This isn’t a metaphor. It’s quite literal. The business model of every social media platform, every news algorithm, every podcast recommendation engine is built around one thing: keeping your attention. And the most reliable way to keep human attention is through threat, conflict, and novelty.

So the geopolitical tensions that would once have filtered through to you over weeks — through newspapers, through conversations, through your financial adviser’s quarterly letter — now arrive in real time, repeatedly, across every device you own. Three updates on the same story in the same day. A new podcast episode every morning. Another market commentary, another expert opinion, another breaking headline.

The result is a distortion of perspective. Events that are genuinely significant but historically normal — a market correction, a geopolitical flare-up, an earnings miss — get amplified into existential crises. The noise-to-signal ratio has never been higher.

Here is what I know to be true, and what the data consistently confirms: markets have recorded 834 new all-time highs since July 2002. That’s through the Global Financial Crisis. Through the European debt crisis. Through a pandemic. Through Ukraine. Through every one of those fourteen market corrections I mentioned earlier. Eight hundred and thirty-four new highs.

And here’s the part that really matters for those who worry about “bad timing”: JP Morgan’s research covering 36 years of S&P 500 data shows that investing at an all-time high produces better forward returns than investing on any other day. Over five years, investing at a market peak returned 80.9% cumulatively, compared to 75.0% on any other day. All-time highs, it turns out, are not warnings. They are confirmation that human ingenuity and economic progress compound over time.

I want to acknowledge something honestly: this has been an unusually extended period of instability. There’s no clean end to point to — no moment since before COVID where things settled and felt normal for a sustained period.

That’s real. The compounding of crises — the pandemic, then inflation, then war, then rates, now this — has created a kind of collective exhaustion. Markets have recovered and grown, but the lived experience of the last five years has been relentless. There’s been no off switch.

But I’d argue that the instability has always been there. What’s changed is our exposure to it. We are now plugged into the global nervous system in a way that previous generations weren’t. Our grandparents lived through the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam era, the oil shocks of the 1970s, the stagflation, the AIDS crisis — without a constant feed of expert commentary and breaking news amplifying every development. They didn’t experience less uncertainty; they just had less noise about it.

The antidote — then and now — is the same. A clear financial plan, built on realistic assumptions, with enough structure to hold firm when the headlines are screaming. Not because the headlines don’t matter. But because reacting to each one, in turn, is the surest way to erode the wealth you’ve spent years building.

The April numbers are worth a moment. Global markets rallied strongly — the S&P 500 up 10.5% for the month, NASDAQ up 15.7%, emerging markets up 14.7%. Locally, the JSE All Share added 1.65% for the month and is up 30% over the past year. Listed property up 5.4%. Bonds up 22% over twelve months. KOPSI is up around 150 – 180 %?

These aren’t numbers from a world that has figured everything out. They’re numbers from the same world I’ve been describing — the same oil prices, the same geopolitical tensions, the same inflation concerns, the same rate uncertainty. Markets moved through all of it, because the fundamentals of human economic activity are more durable than the noise that surrounds them.

The real risk, as it has always been, isn’t volatility. Volatility is the price of participation. The real risk is stepping out of the market during the panic, and then having to decide when it’s safe to step back in. That decision — when it’s finally “safe enough” — almost never gets made at the right time.

Sanity and balance have returned before. They will return. That’s not naïve optimism — it’s the most consistent lesson that financial history offers.

Your job, and mine, is to remain calm and remain solvent through the upheavals. To keep your plan in place. To filter the signal from the noise. To remember that we have been here before, in various forms, and that the human capacity for progress has outlasted every crisis we’ve faced.

The question, as always, is a simple one: How is your plan holding up?

If you’re not sure, or if the noise is getting louder than your confidence in your strategy, that’s exactly the kind of conversation worth having. Reach out — not because the situation is an emergency, but because clarity is always worth more than anxiety.

(AI tools were used to assist with structuring and refining this article, but the views, perspectives, and experiences expressed are Duncan’s own.)