Dear Financial Samurai,
We are back in Lake Tahoe with the family for a long weekend. The last time we were here, an epic blizzard shut down most of the mountain for three straight days. This time it is 70 degrees in March and half the snow has already melted. Two visits, two top 1% weather outcomes. At some point you have to laugh.
But nothing compared to the chaos of Thursday.
After a quick family breakfast, I dropped my son at school at 8:15am, leaving my daughter home with a stomachache. That is when VCX finally started trading, a month and a half after Fundrise first announced it would. Demand was so overwhelming that Fidelity kept halting the stock.
So there I sat in the school parking lot, phone in hand, watching bids come in at $43, $70, $90, $108 against a NAV that started at $19. I was texting my wife every few minutes. We were both stunned.
I got home, checked on my daughter, then took her to school at 10:20am. My wife joined me and we tracked VCX over lunch at the mall. Still gobsmacked.
Everything Happens At Once
With ten minutes to spare before five dads arrived for poker at 1pm, we tidied the house. At 4:40pm, mid poker hand, my phone buzzed. A $60 no show fee from my dentist. I had completely forgotten I had a teeth cleaning at 3pm. Meanwhile, emails were flooding in from readers who had invested in VCX, grateful and equally stunned.
I picked the kids up at 5pm, had dinner at home, then remembered some parents had organized pickleball in the park starting at 6:30pm. I was exhausted having been up since 5am. But I hate flaking, so I went. I left early at 7:40pm, showered, and helped load the car. We were on the road to Tahoe by 8:35pm.
Somewhere in the dark on Highway I-80W, I spent an hour voice dictating the first draft of my latest post. We pulled into the condo at 12:15am and I stayed up until 2:30am writing and editing: Stay Humble After A Large Investment Win: Scrub A Toilet.
26 years separated my first unicorn from my second. VCSY as a wide-eyed first year at Goldman Sachs in 2000. VCX in 2026 as a blurry-eyed FIRE dad with not enough sleep in a school parking lot. Different chapter, same disbelief.
Everything happens at once. It just does. If you want to FIRE with kids while staying dedicated to your craft, get comfortable with the volatility. I hope knowing what goes into each post makes it a little more worth your time to read.
Filled With Mixed Emotions
It has been a genuinely strange week to be paying attention to markets.
The VCX euphoria and the broader macro picture existed on the exact same week, which tells you something about how compartmentalized financial life can feel right now.
Because outside of that extraordinary debut, the broader picture is sobering. The suffering of war continues. Oil prices are elevated. Public stocks are correcting. And the economy is drifting toward stagflation territory again, which historically brings out the worst in comment sections and inboxes alike.
If you want to help people with their finances for free, be prepared for this pattern: criticized loudly when times are hard, ignored quietly when times are good. No good deed goes unpunished. I have made peace with it, mostly.
Personally, 2025 stretched me too thin despite ending on a strong note. So I made a difficult decision to stop helping. In my new post, I Fired Myself As A Money Manager And It Feels Great, I write about what happens when you are tired, spread too thin, and not feeling the appreciation that keeps you going. Maybe you can relate.
A Declining Market Is A Gift For The Young
Here is the reframe I keep coming back to when markets sell off.
After a three year bull run, the gap between where asset prices are and where young people's savings are has never felt wider. Homes, stocks, everything has run ahead of what a 25 year old earning an entry level salary can reasonably accumulate. That is a real problem, and a market correction begins to solve it.
I think of it like a train breaking down on the tracks. Those who missed the last departure keep walking, heads down, wondering if they will ever catch up. Then the train stalls. And suddenly the gap closes. The smart ones jump on before it starts moving again.
We saw exactly this play out in March and April of 2025. I am hopeful we see it again this year. If you have children, or are still on your own path to financial independence, try to see this correction not as a threat but as an opening.
See: A Crashing Stock Market Is Great For Our Children's Future
Charts Of Hope
As a perma-optimist, here are a couple of charts that might give you some hope. The first shows annual S&P 500 returns during periods of war. History is consistent: if you can stomach the initial downturn without selling, returns have ultimately been positive. We are three weeks into the conflict with Iran, and with Trump projecting a four to five week duration, the light at the end of the tunnel may be closer than it feels right now.
The second chart shows stocks have historically bottomed within 12 to 20 days of an initial geopolitical shock. Given we are three weeks in, we may already be at or very near the floor. Of course, there are no guarantees, but there is hope.
Diversification Is Not Overrated
When markets run hot, concentrated investors love to perform. They post their returns, drop their ticker symbols, and make the rest of us feel like cautious fools for staying diversified. Then something breaks, and you remember why diversification exists.
The real trick is emotional consistency. Not letting a big win convince you that you have figured something out permanently. Not letting a rough stretch make you feel like a failure. If you can come home after a brutal day in the market and your family has no idea anything happened, you are closer to mastering this than most people ever get.
Diversification is not about maximizing returns. It is about staying on the tracks long enough for compounding to do its work. The people I have watched blow up over 30 years of investing almost always had one thing in common: they concentrated too much, got confident, and then could not absorb the loss when it came.
If you want to talk through your situation, I have four remaining consulting spots open through May as part of my book promotion. Details on the consulting page.
Alternatively, Empower offers a free financial consult that I have found genuinely worthwhile. Here's a post about my experience, along with instructions on how to sign up.
Whatever you do, review your asset allocation this week. Make sure it still reflects your actual risk tolerance, not the risk tolerance you had when markets were only going up.
Putting Public Venture Capital On The Map
A big congratulations once again to Ben Miller, Russell Tischler, Kendall Davis, and the entire Fundrise team on launching VCX, the original public venture capital fund, on the NYSE. The first two days of demand were incredible. Whether that enthusiasm translates into long term performance is something we will all find out together, and I mean that literally as a fellow investor sitting in the same six month lockup.
What I do know after more than ten years working with this team is that they have consistently done the unglamorous work most people never see, kept innovating when others stood still, and seized market opportunities that many people missed entirely. I am excited for what comes next. Onwards!
Fight on,
Sam
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Disclaimer: Fundrise is a paid partner of Financial Samurai and Financial Samurai is a long-time investor in Fundrise products. I partner and invest only those partners I believe in.