To say the stock market has been a roller coaster would be misleading. Because many people really love roller coasters and pay a lot of money to ride them. The stock market, at least since the beginning of April, has been more of a cruel circus. One with bulls and bears. A lot of bears.
April 2 has gone down in Wikipedia history as the day of “2025 stock market crash.” It was on this day that global stock markets began to teeter and then nosedive — a reaction to the new tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump. The days that followed were Wall Street’s worst nightmare. By the night of April 6, the S&P 500 had lost 15% of its value since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Read Next: Here’s the Minimum Salary Required To Be Considered Upper Class in 2025
On April 9, Trump announced a 90-day pause on some of the “reciprocal” tariffs that he’s planning to roll out. The stock market instantly perked up and soared. But the merriment on Wall Street didn’t last long; on April 10, the stock market tumbled after the White House confirmed that the tariff on goods from China is at least 145% — higher than previously announced or expected.
It’s during times like these — when economic uncertainty is peaking and the stock market is pinballing around, making a toy of our hard-earned retirement savings and other investments — that we’d best turn to the sage insights of Warren Buffett, who has made his unfathomable fortune (he’s currently worth more than $150 billion) primarily through investing. What advice has he shared about investing when the stock market is volatile?
Buffett, 94, has long championed the notion of staying calm and carrying on with your investment practices, even when the market gets rocky. For one, you can’t make good decisions when you’re panicked.
“An unsettled mind will not make good decisions,” Buffett wrote in his 2017 annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Buffett recommended a specific pensive reprieve during a stock market decline: reading Rudyard Kipling’s 1895 poem “If.” He said to heed the following lines, in particular:
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs … If you can wait and not be tired by waiting … If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim … If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you … Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”
See More: 15 Investments Warren Buffett Regrets
Buffett is one of the few famous multibillionaires who wants to see other multibillionaires (and, more specifically, their mega-companies) pay their fair share in taxes — arguing that if they paid up, the average American would be spared the onus of paying federal taxes. Additionally, Buffett is a pretty diehard philanthropist. So, “greed” isn’t really a vibe he gives off — but it is a quality he verbatim recommends when the market nosedives.
