The ‘Stock Market Maestros’ Author Has a Brutally Simple Rule for Long-Term Investors

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David Beren

Sun, May 24, 2026 astatine 1:56 PM CDT 4 min read

Quick Read

SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) delivered a 28% one-year instrumentality done May 2026, with 80% gains implicit 5 years and 259% implicit 10 years, rewarding disciplined investors who maintained their strategy contempt a VIX spike to $29.17 successful March that triggered retail capitulation.
The quality betwixt winners and losers successful investing comes down to pursuing a structured program done volatility alternatively than abandoning positions during marketplace stress, arsenic demonstrated by Fidelity’s 654,000 401(k) millionaires who averaged $613,200 successful savings done disciplined, time-horizon-matched contributions.
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Clare Flynn Levy, writer of Stock Market Maestros, precocious appeared connected the Afford Anything podcast and delivered what whitethorn beryllium the astir deflating proposal a semipermanent capitalist tin hear: halt trying to beryllium clever. "If you're being long-term, and you are really being it, that's each you request to do," she told big Paula Pant. The regularisation is deceptively simple, and that simplicity is precisely wherefore astir radical neglect to travel it.

The Rule Is Structure

Flynn Levy is cautious to gully a hard enactment betwixt disciplined semipermanent investing and autopilot neglect. Being long-term, she explains, "means perpetually recalibrating what your needs are, what your deadline is, what your clip skyline is, and each of that, and besides what your wants are, and perpetually redoing that equation." The enactment is ongoing. The decisions, ideally, are not.

Her closing enactment connected the amusement was adjacent blunter: "You conscionable request a spot of operation that you really travel astir however you invest. If you bash that, you're going to beryllium fine." The operative operation is "actually follow." Plenty of investors person a plan, but acold less obey their plans erstwhile markets crook ugly.

The expert who called NVIDIA successful 2010 conscionable named his apical 10 stocks and SPDR S&P 500 ETF wasn't 1 of them. Get them present FREE.

Why the Past Year Validated the Framework

The past 12 months are a near-perfect lawsuit study. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) closed astatine $745.64 connected May 22, 2026, posting a 28% one-year return. Stretch the horizon, and the lawsuit strengthens: 80% implicit 5 years and 259% implicit ten.

That tidy instrumentality communicative obscures however nerve-wracking the thrust was. The CBOE Volatility Index spiked to $29.17 connected March 27, 2026, a level that historically pushes retail investors toward the exits. It has since settled to 16.76 arsenic of May 21, squarely backmost successful the mean range. Investors who recalibrated done that turbulence (rather than abandoning ship) ain the gains. Those who sold into the spike booked the nonaccomplishment and missed the recovery.

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