Forest Hill's Jeff Judge in The Daily Upside: A Scary Market Headline Is Not a Broken Year

By Jeff Judge, CFP®, AEP®, ChFC®, CLU®, Managing Partner, Chesapeake Financial Planners, Forest Hill, MD.

When The Daily Upside asked me how I am reading the second half of 2026, I kept coming back to one idea. A year with two or three scary headlines is a normal year, not a broken one.

Earlier this year that played out in real time. According to the article, the market fell sharply when the Iran news broke, then recovered much of that ground over the following weeks as earnings came back into focus. The full round trip took less than a year. The exact figures trace to the outlet's reporting and are worth verifying, but the shape of it is the part that matters.

Here is what I tell clients. The whipsaw is the cost of admission for returns. Trying to dodge the drop is how people turn a paper loss into a permanent one. You sell near the bottom, you wait for an all-clear that never quite arrives, and you buy back higher.

For Harford County readers who are within a few years of retirement, this is not abstract. A market drop in that window can feel like a reason to act. More often, the move that helps most is the one you made before the headline, by deciding in advance what you will do so a headline does not get a vote.

The takeaway: a plan you can explain in sixty seconds is what keeps a scary week from becoming a costly decision.

This piece builds on "'Hawkish Hold' in Interest Rates, Iran Turmoil Prompt Advisors to Rethink Second Half of 2026," in The Daily Upside (June 2026).

Jeff Judge, CFP®, AEP®, ChFC®, CLU®, is Managing Partner at Chesapeake Financial Planners in Forest Hill, MD. Book an intro call.