I’ve written earlier in “Ignore daily Financial Noise“: Even with a brilliant investment plan, it takes diligence to overcome emotional biases and avoid making investing mistakes. Naturally you love it when your portfolio values go up. But when they go down, even slightly, you may be tempted to make poor choices.

Dennis Stearn, another financial advisor, writing about how his firm handles the relentless media flow of one over hyped crisis after another writes in “Betting On Our Future” in Financial Planning magazine has similar thoughts:

From articles to newscasts, from social media to blogs, it can be easy for your clients to get the impression that major, wealth-threatening black swan events are right around every corner. This trend will only get worse by 2023. That creates more behavioral finance challenges. When coupled with “big data” machines that push our buying buttons, fear and greed can hurt our clients’ ability to reach their desired financial future. To counter popular media, we hold regular behavioral finance trainings for our own team. And we use our newsletters to highlight research that helps clients recognize when their “buy” buttons may be getting pushed.

There is a rebalancing bonus for not just sticking the course of a brilliant investment strategy, but actually rebalancing back to it, which is, in and of itself, a contrarian move.