Today's inclusion of 'The Most Important Thing in Investing':

What matters most is not worrying about market volatility, but being vigilant about the permanent loss of principal.

💡 Interpretation:

Many people equate 'stock price decline' with 'risk', which scares them into a panic sell. However, Howard Marks incisively points out: the real risk is not the price fluctuations, but the possibility that the underlying asset value of your investment is permanently impaired, or even goes to zero.

● Volatility is temporary: Market sentiment and short-term news can cause prices to fluctuate wildly, but high-quality asset prices will ultimately return to their intrinsic value. As long as you can hold on, many 'paper losses' are just games on paper.

● Permanent loss is fatal: This means the fundamentals of the company you invested in have deteriorated completely (such as technological obsolescence, financial fraud, or a huge debt crisis), or you bought at an extremely crazy high valuation peak, resulting in a value that can never recover. Losses at this point are the real, irretrievable losses.

So the key is to distinguish between what is price volatility and what is permanent loss. For altcoins, many that have been on a downward trend may never recover because the speculators abandon them, leading to infinite issuance. In contrast, hard currencies like BTC, over time, will have their anti-inflation properties support the recovery of their prices.