Our entire investment philosophy is underwritten by a simple fundamental belief: tomorrow will be better than today. We can’t know that this will be true of every single tomorrow, but we’re pretty sure of what the long term trend will be.

Though they say that “past performance does not guarantee future results”, human civilization has a track record thousands of years long of managing to always do bigger and better things. We expect that things will continue to get bigger and better as time goes on. Without this belief the idea of investing in the future is meaningless.

We know that there are troubles in the world, as the news frequently reminds us. Clients sometimes come to us fearing that the latest bad news signals imminent total catastrophe. This isn’t anything new–people have been predicting the end of civilization for the entire span of human history. Yet somehow we’ve always gone on to bigger and better things all the same.

If such things ever do come to pass, it isn’t going to matter what investments you own. Your meanest neighbor will be trying to steal your canned goods. So the ideal portfolio for the end of the world is the one that will serve you best in the event that the end of the world fails to show up on schedule—again.