Ignoring the War Has Been Working for Long-Term Investors

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Strategies

Ignoring the War Has Been Working for Long-Term Investors

The U.S. stock market’s quick rebound this month may be fragile, but riding out the market’s disconcerting waves has been a sound strategy.

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Tehran in the early days of the war. For investors who have held broad index funds that mirror the market, it’s been a decent year so far.

Credit...

Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By

Jeff Sommer

Jeff Sommer writes

Strategies

, a weekly column on markets, finance and the economy.

April 24, 2026

Updated

9:39 a.m. ET

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For buy-and-hold investors in the U.S. stock market, it’s almost as though the war in Iran never happened.

If you’ve held broad index funds that mirror the market, you will probably find that it’s been a decent year so far, with positive returns for the benchmark S&P 500 stock index and for most of its sectors. That may seem astonishing because of the war and the periodic sharp financial losses it’s inflicted.

There has been chaos in the oil markets, and the roller coaster for stock investors might plunge again at any time. Still, some basic investing wisdom has held true so far: For those with long horizons, just sticking with the markets has generally been a good move, even when the markets act up. That’s been the case whether the problems stem from war, pandemics, politics or nearly any other abrupt event.

As I

pointed out

near the start of this war, the U.S. stock market has usually fared well after recent wars, and over the long haul. That said, markets are often volatile while a war is underway, and that’s certainly been true this time. The markets dropped sharply in March, but then regained lost ground in a rally earlier this month. In just 11 trading days in April, the S&P 500 rose more than 10.7 percent and reached a new peak, more than erasing the losses sustained in the early weeks of the war.

There’s no guarantee that this market resilience will continue. The economic damage caused by the war is far from over. It might be wise to consider the market recovery as a reprieve — an opportunity to review some investing fundamentals and get ready for the next storm.

The Numbers

There’s no doubt that, most of the time, buy-and-hold investing has worked well in the United States.

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