The Ascend Letter

Planning Corner: A Plan Removes Emotion

A few weeks back I met with a prospect who wanted to invest in Bitcoin, and he planned to do it using MicroStrategy (MSTR) as his proxy. I had already been tracking MSTR closely but he was hesitant to deploy his money into the stock. He was convinced it was still going lower after it had already fallen about 55% since May 2026 and 80% since July 2025.

So I asked him, Do you believe Bitcoin itself is going higher? His answer was an immediate, emphatic yes. He was sure it would be dramatically higher within a couple of years. He believed so deeply in where the asset was going, and he still could not bring himself to buy.

Why?

Because investing can be emotional. We all carry money scripts, beliefs about risk and loss wired into us by our own history. This person feared the pain of a loss more than he wanted the reward of being right. That fear can be paralyzing even when we have strong conviction.

Well, the market did what it loves to do. Bitcoin ripped. Its best 3 day run in its history. So now he is left with two bad options:

1. He never buys, because he is anchored to the lower price he wishes he had paid.
2. He finally caves, chases the momentum, gets filled near the top, and watches it turn against him.

Both roads lead to regret. And both come from the same mistake. No plan.

The fix is boringly simple. Have a plan. A plan removes the emotion. It trades the impossible job of nailing the top for the safer one of owning good assets over time. When you have decided in advance what you own and why, the noise stops making your decisions for you.

So remember this. Timing the market is not an investment strategy. It is gambling on two points in time.

Build the plan. Then stick to it.

The Macro

This week the government tried to bend the bond market to its will. The bond market had other plans.

Long-term interest rates have been climbing for weeks, and on Tuesday the 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest level since 2007. That matters to everyone, because long rates set the cost of mortgages, car loans, and business borrowing. So on Wednesday the Treasury pulled a surprise, announcing it would at least double the amount of long-term bonds it buys back, stepping in as a big buyer to force yields down.

It worked for about a day. Yields dropped on the news, then climbed right back. The 10-year finished the week near 4.74% and the 30-year near 5.28%, almost exactly where they started, as if the intervention never happened.

The national debt just crossed $40 trillion, the deficit keeps widening, inflation is still above target, the dollar is soft, and tech companies are flooding the market with new debt to fund the AI buildout. The Treasury Secretary says he has a big toolkit and will use more of it. But you cannot buy your way out of a debt problem by issuing more debt.

Then President Trump said, "The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will." Whatever he meant by it, that is not what calms a market.

The nerves showed up elsewhere too. The gauge I am watching most is credit spreads. The gap between what companies pay to borrow and what the government pays keeps widening, an early warning that risk is being repriced.

The strange part is how calm it all looks on the surface. The VIX, the market's fear gauge, sat near 15 all week, with the real turbulence hiding in just two corners, Semi and Crypto, while the S&P quietly drifted. That kind of quiet rarely lasts. And underneath it, the rotation I have been tracking rolls on, money leaving the crowded AI trade for healthcare, financials, and smaller names.