U.S. stocks went on a bit of a wild ride on Monday in reaction to President Donald Trump’s announcement of last-minute delays on expected 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indices, after starting the morning with a dive, ended the day in more of a jostle. Apparently, all that was required to moderate a trade war was a pledge to dispatch troops to the border and get tougher on fentanyl. More of the same — the uncertainties, the drama, the market gyrations — surely lie ahead as there’s still the matter of a 10% tariff on goods imported from China that went into effect Tuesday. And who knows what else may be coming?

Such uncertainty linked to threatened tariffs comes as no surprise. Nor does the possibility that Americans may be paying a high price for them — in purchases (everything from avocadoes to cars), in exports as tariffs are matched tit-for-tat, in trade-dependent jobs and, yes, stock prices. Even President Donald Trump more or less acknowledged the likelihood of hardship when he noted on a social media post over the weekend that “some pain” will be felt by Americans. “WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID,” he wrote.

In the midst of such an uproar — and that’s not even counting further economic uncertainties, particularly in Maryland with its wealth of public sector jobs now under scrutiny by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, in this still-fledgling administration that seems unbound by convention — we would offer our readers this brief counsel: Don’t make your own bad financial decisions out of fear.

Americans have grown increasingly dependent on tax-advantaged, employer-sponsored savings accounts like the 401(k), 403(b) and others to finance their retirement through defined contributions instead of traditional pensions with their defined benefits. As a result, many average workers are required to make basic choices about where to invest that money including in the stock market and in bonds. Historically, stocks have beaten bonds and other alternative investments over time and so electing to put a substantial portion of retirement funds in the stock market seems a reasonable choice.

The danger is that people, now worried about the potential global economic uncertainties ahead, will abandon that sensible philosophy and pull out of stocks. This sort of “market timing” as it’s often called can be tempting. Had you sold stocks in September 1929, for example, you would have avoided the “Black Tuesday” October crash. Yet often overlooked is how the best gains in the stock market can just as readily be missed. Studies have shown that some of the market’s biggest advances have been shortly after declines. Thus, in avoiding the bad, you could just as readily avoid the good. Consider, for example, how not long after the subprime mortgage crash, the market bounced back in 2008 with the S&P 500 posting a record 11.58% gain in a single day. Further, if you’re young and plan to save for decades, the stock market generally trends upward over long periods of time anyway.

All of which strongly recommends that people saving for a long-term retirement need to be careful not to be swept away in panic selling, particularly the sort that can cause you to lock in losses and miss the inevitable rebound. Nor should all this uncertainty cause people, at least those who have the option, to dial down their retirement savings rates. It is beyond worrisome that an estimated 56 million American workers don’t have access to a work-sponsored retirement savings plan at all. Small wonder that more than half of the country worries about the adequacy of their retirement savings. And all Americans should be worried about that shortfall: Taxpayers are bound to be left on the hook by it.

No one can predict the future of markets. Even the most seasoned stock pickers, as Burton Malkeil’s “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” suggests, don’t fare much better than blindfolded monkeys with darts. There will be days when big companies like Nvidia will do a nosedive because investors will get scared about a Chinese artificial intelligence startup called DeepSeek is bound to dominate the AI market — or that may prove an overreaction. And we can’t be certain what President Trump and his loyalists will do next. But especially for Americans facing retirement in ten years or more, it’s clear enough that stocks need to be a major point of your portfolio to better afford your life ahead.

Sometimes, the best way to deal with bad news is to pay no attention to it.