(An audio version of this letter can be found as Episode 67 of The Unlimited Podcast by Ginsler Wealth. Use the link provided or find us on your favourite podcast app: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / YouTube)
Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.
– Mike Tyson
To Ginsler Wealth’s Clients:
If you grew up in the 1980s like me, and had an original Nintendo gaming system, you probably recognize this string of numbers: 007 373 5963. If seeing those numbers gives you flashbacks to being punched in the mouth, read on…
And if you have no idea what the heck I’m talking about, read on as well.
In the mid-1980s, Mike Tyson exploded onto the boxing scene with a ferocious, crowd-captivating style, rapidly becoming the youngest heavyweight champion in history while dispatching opponents—often in the first round—with unprecedented speed and power. His aura of invincibility and mainstream appeal made him a cultural phenomenon, extending beyond sports into global celebrity. By 1987, his dominance and popularity were cemented in pop culture with the release of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, bringing his intimidating presence into millions of homes.
My autographed photo of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.
My home was one of them. Like most of my 11- and 12-year-old friends, I played Punch-Out religiously. In the game, you had to defeat a ladder of increasingly difficult fighters before reaching Tyson at the top:
Glass Joe → Von Kaiser → Piston Honda → Don Flamenco → King Hippo → Great Tiger → Bald Bull → Soda Popinski → Mr. Sandman → Super Macho Man → Mike Tyson
It wasn’t easy and took a ton of time, and that was if you could make it through.
And then rumours started circling around the rough and tough school yard at Associated Hebrew Day School: there was a secret code you could enter when the game powered on that would get you right to Tyson! 007 373 5963.
I must have fought Tyson a hundred times. First, lasting less than 5 seconds, but eventually beating the greatest boxer in the world. It turns out that when you can play out being punched in the mouth over and over, you can learn how to anticipate it, accept it, manage through it, or avoid it.
Tyson’s quote was trash talk directed at his opponents. Every fighter stepped into that ring with a strategy, a game plan, and a team of coaches who had studied his every move. Then Tyson threw a punch. Plan over.
But here’s the more interesting question: what about Tyson himself when he was the one getting punched in the mouth? Because he did get punched in the mouth. Literally. And his answer to that question is actually what this letter is about. He knew it was coming, he accepted it, he anticipated it, he tried to avoid it, and he managed through it. In short, he had a plan for being punched in the mouth — in his job.
And so do I — in mine.
KNOW IT: 2026 STARTED WITH A BANG
My first day back after the holidays began with a bad snowstorm. But having been away for a few weeks, I was eager to get into the office and start the new year with a bang. Little did I know that was exactly what was going to happen.
As I sat stopped at the last stoplight before reaching my office, I saw in my rearview mirror a car approaching quickly and ultimately sliding into the back of my car.
I pulled over on the side street, spoke to the perpetrator, got a picture of his license plate, drivers license and insurance, shook his hand (he didn’t mean to do it of course) and was at my office 2 minutes later.
My previous experience with minor fender-benders (all not my fault, of course), meant that I was able to handle what might otherwise have been an unnerving situation with calm, efficiency, and care.
(Admittedly, when I got the call from my daughter after just getting her license that she was rear-ended while at a stoplight – that was certainly a punch in the mouth.)
Similarly, the start of 2026 has felt unnerving and unprecedented for many investors. Trump’s surprise capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and recent and ongoing war with Iran were both unpredictable events. Plus, the relentless AI narrative feels as if the world is changing daily right before our eyes. How can an investor manage when things are different this time?
Well, they are not. We only have to look back to the same period last year to see similar market reactions to Trump’s tariffs and other unsettling or unpredictable world events. The chart below shows the performance of U.S. and Canadian equity markets this past quarter relative to their respective performance in the first quarter of 2025. The lines and ending points look eerily similar.
I am not suggesting that the rest of 2026 will turn out the same as 2025 (remember, I don’t have a crystal ball). But as investors, we know that the world is always unnerving and unpredictable. Knowing what he was getting into, I doubt when Buster Douglas entered the ring with Mike Tyson in February 1990, he thought to himself: “This is going to be easy.” And this was likely especially the case when Tyson knocked him down in the 8th round. But looking back after he defeated Tyson by KO in the 10th round in one of the biggest upsets in sports history, I’m sure things looked great in the rearview mirror.
As I’ve repeated too often (including my last quarterly letter about why wealth is hard), over the long-term, markets have always gone up. But investors have to be ready for many punches, jabs, hooks, and a few knockouts. It’s only when you look back over a long time period (or make it through 10 rounds of fighting!) that you realize you’ve won.
ANTICIPATE IT
Tyson undoubtedly had a plan for being punched in the mouth because he undoubtedly anticipated that might happen. Similarly, when we perform due diligence on any investment strategy, we must do so with the anticipation that something could go wrong with the strategy itself or external factors that could lead to problems.
Currently, private real estate and private credit funds around the world are facing a wave of redemption requests. But because the underlying assets are less liquid (it’s hard to sell a building in a day), even some of the world’s largest investment firms—like Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo, and Blue Owl—are limiting withdrawals (the industry calls this “gating”). The issue isn’t necessarily collapsing fundamentals of the
underlying assets, but a mismatch: investors want liquidity at the same time, and the psychology of “gating” can actually accelerate redemption requests.
A few of the “private” strategies we utilize have also been caught up in this acceleration of redemption requests. While no one likes to be told they can’t get their funds immediately, the reality is that in the absence of this “gating” situation, we wouldn’t have been looking to redeem anyway.
Our initial and ongoing diligence gives us comfort that the underlying assets are strong. For example, the private real estate funds we are in own hundreds of apartment buildings across Canada (and some in the U.S.) that are close to fully occupied, with tenants paying rent and investors continuing to receive distributions each month.
In all instances, we are in direct and regular communication with the CEOs of these firms. Each has a plan to increase liquidity for investors. Anticipating that a problem could always arise, ensuring any holding is never an outsized portion of a client’s portfolio, and really understanding the underlying assets, gives us comfort to expect this situation to eventually resolve as and when investors see some liquidity flowing their way.
(TRY TO) AVOID IT BY “CHASING CHICKENS”
In Rocky II, Rocky’s trainer Mickey tells him that to build his speed, he needs to “chase the chicken”, and if he can “catch this thing, you can catch greased lighting”.
While Rocky replies, “I’m a fighter, I ain’t a farmer,” this past quarter, after about six months of diligence, we have turned to the farmers (and their chickens) to help our clients avoid some of the punches that the more traditional investment markets will inevitably throw at their portfolios.
More specifically, we have started to allocate to a fund that lends money to Canadian farmers.[i] As Robb Nelson, CEO of Farm Lending Canada, said during our recent podcast discussion, farmers are the best borrowers because their farms have been in their families for generations, they sit on a street that is likely named after the family itself, and they will do everything in their power not to lose the farm.[ii] Perhaps it is no surprise, therefore, that Robb’s farm lending fund has never lost a penny of principal or interest in its history.[iii]
While Rocky tells Mickey that he feels like “a Kentucky Fried Idiot” chasing the chicken, we are always extremely excited to find truly uncorrelated (or less correlated) investment strategies to add to client portfolios.
MANAGE THROUGH IT
Once you are in the ring, you have to rely on your preparation to manage through. And sometimes it is clear that forces around you are changing and require adapting or embracing on the fly.
One of those relentless forces right now is AI. I have written about our focus on AI repeatedly. Our first AI-related podcast was back in January 2023 (centuries ago in “AI terms”), after we had already started investing in the space.[iv] Our approach with any new or important transformation is to learn and understand as much as possible – to help us determine what it means for our clients, their portfolios, and our business. We have certainly done this with AI.
This past quarter, I had the opportunity to visit NVIDIA’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California and hear directly from some its most senior leaders about what’s happening in AI – and the relentless demand for its use, limited only by the world’s supply of power. The message coming out of that NVIDIA visit was hard-hitting: according to NVIDIA’s CEO, Jenson Huang: “there will be a billion times more tokens generated in 5 years”[v]. (FYI: Tokens are units of data – like words – that AI processes and generates).
And I strongly believe we are ahead of the curve relative to most companies, and certainly most in our industry. Perhaps that is why the organizers of Future Proof Citywide – a large-scale conference held in Miami Beach dedicated exclusively to AI’s impact on wealth and investment management – asked me to speak about Ginsler Wealth’s implementation of AI, and in particular ginsler.ai, my AI clone. We continue to experiment with AI inside our firm with the goal of improving operations, efficiency, and speed for the benefit of our clients.
AI elicits both excitement and fear. In February, “a piece of AI science fiction rocked the stock market”[vi]. Using one of my favourite phrases, Derek Thompson’s “Nobody Knows Anything” article serves to calm down the fear. And my friend and Harvard Business School classmate, Myoung Cha (formerly Head, Apple Health Strategic Initiatives) explains why – yes – AI will likely eliminate some narrow, task-based jobs, but…by making cognitive work dramatically cheaper, it will also expand demand for that work, often creating more total activity, not less.
Since AI can now code everything (I’ve personally now coded one game, two apps, and multiple reporting dashboards), one would naturally think coding jobs would be eliminated swiftly. But the exact opposite is happening:
In other words, the future of work isn’t fewer jobs—it’s different jobs, with humans shifting from doing the work to directing, judging, and expanding it.
Whether you view AI with excitement or fear — or some combination of both — the right response isn’t to freeze. It’s to prepare, adapt, and keep moving forward. Which, come to think of it, is probably exactly how Buster Douglas approached getting into the ring with Tyson.
—————–
And by the way — remember the question I asked at the top? What does Tyson do when he’s the one getting punched in the mouth?
Here’s his answer, in his own words, about that fight with Buster Douglas:
That’s one of my best…because I took some [expletive] shots. Nobody would’a took them shots.
Boxing is like this game of life.
Suppose I let that discourage me.
Imagine if I said, ‘man, maybe I should give it up. Maybe I don’t got the heart for this no more.’
I would never do that.
Suppose I did that instead of saying ‘Man, that’s nothing. I’ll be champ in 6 months.’
And eventually he was. Twice.
Even getting knocked out by a 12-year-old Brian Ginsler couldn’t stop Mike. And we won’t stop fighting – or at least working really hard – for our clients either. No matter what punches get thrown our way.
Thank you for your continued trust, support, and confidence. We are available 24/7 should you need us.
Sincerely,
Brian Ginsler
President & CEO
[i] As usual, any allocation is made taking into account each client’s individual goals, objectives and risk tolerance. So any particular investment may not be appropriate or suitable for certain clients.
[ii] This is a summary of some of Robb’s main points. The full podcast with related content can be found at: https://ginslerwealth.com/farm-lending-with-robb-nelson-on-the-unlimited-podcast/
[iii] According to Robb Nelson and Farm Lending Canada.
[iv] This initial investment was in an AI-focused venture capital fund, and therefore was only suitable for certain clients.
[v] Source: Presentation by Justin Hodgson. Head of AI Factories, NVIDIA. February 2026.
[vi] Derek Thompson. Nobody Knows Anything. https://www.derekthompson.org/p/nobody-knows-anything
[vii] Source: Citadel Securities, Indeed. Sourced from: https://be-curious-not-judgmental.com/2026/02/28/the-jevons-paradox-of-ai-what-programmers-and-medical-scribes-reveal-about-the-future-of-work/
