Has the recent drop got you questioning life a bit? I see a lot of people starting to dig into macro reports, study the Fed’s dot plot, and even learn complex on-chain data analysis, thinking they’re losing money because they haven’t read enough books. Stop torturing yourself. Today, let me tell you about the experience of legendary fund manager Peter Lynch. Let’s go back to 1987’s “Black Monday”: It was one of the scariest days in Wall Street history. The Dow Jones plunged 22.6% in a single day (doesn’t this volatility feel a bit like the crypto world?). At the time, Peter Lynch was managing the Magellan Fund, and in just two days, its assets on paper shrank by one-third. Billions of dollars evaporated in an instant. Investors went crazy, blowing up his phone, demanding redemptions. That sense of panic is exactly the same as what we feel now, watching our accounts get cut in half. Peter Lynch was just as stunned back then, but he made a decision that later became legendary: apart from handling necessary redemptions, he didn’t sell a single stock. Looking back on that experience, he said that at that moment, all economic knowledge and mathematical models failed. Harvard grads and hot dog vendors on the street were equally panicked. But he held on. Because he knew the companies were still the same companies, their profitability hadn’t changed, and the drop was just an emotional reaction. Sure enough, it didn’t take long for the market to recover, and he went on to achieve an annualized return of 29%, creating his legendary track record. He left behind a quote that deserves to be pasted on every trader’s computer screen: “In the stock market, the most important organ isn’t the brain, it’s the stomach.” What does that mean? It means that when a crash happens, what you need isn’t a smart brain to analyze why it’s happening, but a strong stomach that can digest extreme volatility without feeling sick or throwing up. “Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it. But not everyone has the stomach.” — Peter Lynch