IMPORTANT War Updates... The Impact of Oil

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life.

**Kirk Chisholm** (0:12)
Hello, Smart Money Tree Podcast listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name is Kirk Chisholm. I'll be your host. And today, I'm joined with Doug Heagren. Hey, Doug.

**Douglas Heagren** (0:18)
Hey, Kirk. How's it going today?

**Kirk Chisholm** (0:19)
Doing great. Actually, I got some reasonably nice weather after our 40 degrees spell here. It's typical New England spring.

**Douglas Heagren** (0:27)
Same in Minnesota. As a matter of fact, I'm really excited because this is our Scouts' annual scout trout fishing trip. And that's to southeast Minnesota. And it can be hit or miss. Two years ago, it was really nice. Last year, every kid was turning blue as we woke up and it was in the mid-20s, and frost was on everything. And then, of course, the last thing you want to do is start going and putting your hand in water. So this year, it looked like it was going to be a rough weekend. And then as the weeks progressed, we saw highs move from like 40s, now to the 60s.
Oh, I'm feeling really good to get away for trout opener and enjoy this weekend. And as anybody listening, time with the kids. Time is something you never get back, always fun.

**Kirk Chisholm** (1:05)
That's true. We got two kids in high school, my youngest in high school next year, and a few more years, they'll be off to college and probably never seen again. So we're trying to enjoy as much as possible the time we have with them. And even when they go off, I remember when I was younger, my parents take me on trips. They're like, oh, we should go to Europe. I'm like, okay, free trip, sure. But it's like the only way they would hang out with them, because at a certain time, you just want to do your thing.
We're trying to take advantage of that while we can, because it's getting a little weird. Like, what are we going to do with ourselves? We have to come up with a hobby.

**Douglas Heagren** (1:39)
That's right.

**Kirk Chisholm** (1:41)
So it's been an interesting week. It's the last six, I guess, at this point have been. The war and not war is still going on, not going on. Every day is an adventure.
We had a surprise on Thursday night, Wednesday night, going into Thursday, where markets dropped really quickly.
There was some news out that there was some missiles being fired back and forth. And then the reports came back and said, no, no, no, that was just, they were just doing training missions. Like, oh, so in the middle of a war where the ceasefire training missions where there's a bunch of firing going on, that's a good idea. That's a really, really smart idea. Glad they thought of that.

**Douglas Heagren** (2:16)
Whoever is working the spin on that one, probably should have done a little more work in figuring out if that was the best thing to put out there. I feel like that could have been handled better.

**Kirk Chisholm** (2:25)
It was actually a reasonable excuse, I believe it. I don't know if it's true, but I believe it. It's like, okay, everyone kind of agrees, that's it. And then the markets went back up. Yesterday was a rough day in the markets, today is fine.
We're in this place where I just kind of want to talk this through, because we talked it through a few weeks ago before we get into some specifics.
When you think of investing, you have to think of the world in terms of frameworks. We as human beings are not good at all at predicting the future. We all do it. Our brains operate like a prediction engine. We all try to predict the future, and we're terrible at it. All of us are terrible at it, because if you're good at it, you'd be a bazillionaire, but we can't predict the future. But our brains naturally go there. So rather than trying to predict the future, a better way to handle it is to look at the world in terms of frameworks. If this is true, then this other thing should be true. So typically, when I do investing, I look at frameworks. If you look at pre-war, there's a pre-war framework, I guess you can call it a great rotation, because the markets were rotating. It was normal. People didn't like it because tech wasn't doing well, but everything else is fine. Typically, the markets through economic cycles will rotate. They rotate from one area to the next area. That's healthy. And that's exactly what was happening in pretty much the end of the year, end of the year towards end of February.