This was Oct. 19, 1987, also known as Black Monday, the largest one-day percentage decline in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The massive sell-off resulted in roughly $500 billion in market capitalization vanishing and a lot of mighty scared people.
But Louis Llanes wasn't one of them.
"No, no, no," the portfolio manager and TheStreet Pro contributor insisted. "It got me excited because I actually was at that time more involved with more thinking global macro. You could be short, you could be long, you could be commodities, stocks, bonds, currencies."
Wealth advisor takes the long view
Llanes, founder of Wealthnet Investments, LLC and author of The Financial Freedom Blueprint, shared his views about a variety of market-related topics with Chris Versace, lead portfolio manager for TheStreet Pro Portfolio, in the May 15 edition of TheStreet Stocks & Markets Podcast.
"So, I've been in a lot of different areas in the business," he said. "I started off on the sales side, where you’re going out and finding clients. And I learned very quickly at that time that many of the incentives at the larger Wall Street firms were not necessarily aligned with making money."
"We had all the research," he added. "I was, like, this doesn't make sense. I'm in this business to make money."
As far as people who are just coming to the market, Llanes said he sees two types of newer investors.
"One wants to do it themselves, is interested in it, and highly capable of doing it themselves," he said. "Maybe they're an engineer or something like that. Their psychology is different than, say, somebody who's got a job. They're a manager or something like that, and they don't have time for that. You have a different kind of a view on how to do things."
Llanes advises people generally to continue investing based on the long term.
"It depends on how old you are," he said, "but to have more of a longer term view and to have one based on an investment strategy that's based on economics, not on emotion. The biggest problem you get is, for example, let's say you're a doctor, you're going to hear all sorts of things in the operating table or when you're doing whatever."
"And those clients that I have that are in those fields, they tend to have all sorts of things like, hey, 'what do you think of this?'" Llanes added. "They're hearing all these things and people will talk about, all the things that they made money on. Nobody talks about the things that they lose money on."
Remember, he said, "the people who are talking a lot about how much money they made on something probably aren't doing as well as you think they are."
Llanes said that the old adage about letting your profits run and cutting your losses short is probably the most important rule in investing.
Breaking down the tariff turmoil
"As soon as you know you're wrong, get out," he said. "And if you're not sure, if things are working out in your favor, be a little bit apprehensive or a lot apprehensive to just unload that security."
The conversation turned President Donald Trump's scattergun tariff plan that has gone through several personality changes since the April 2 "Liberation Day" announcement.
Llanes said that he expected from the very beginning that tariffs would be rolled back "because it was a shock that came to the system on the approach."
"There's a difference between how the initial communication went to the public on how we were going to deal with tariffs," he said. "Right on its face, we knew it wasn't feasible. So we knew there'd there would be some pulling back."
While Llanes thinks the negotiations will be more on the normal side, the initial approach was good since it got a lot of people talking very quickly, and "the ball is moving a lot faster" now than the traditional country-by-country method.
"So, in terms of as an investor, I think that the biggest thing is that you just have to understand that there's going to be winners and losers in this." he said.
Llanes' said all of the trends are pointing toward interest rates staying higher.
"Nobody really knows how the tariffs are going to work out," he said. "I mean, we're still working through it. The tariffs won't be as inflationary as the alarmists are saying."
Llanes believes the other part of the equation, which will see more investment in the U.S., will continue to increase.
"That will hold up interest rates," he said. "And I think that's going to affect the real fast-growing companies that are way overvalued. They're going to struggle, I believe."
