Image Credit: Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, “Julie Le Brun Looking into a Mirror” (ca. 1786), Metropolitan Museum of Art

With U.S. stocks down — at their worst — around 27% in 16 trading days, investors need to get out of the prognostication business. Nobody — not epidemiologists, not government officials, not economists and certainly not market strategists — can say how large an impact the coronavirus will end up having. The optimists might be wrong; so might the pessimists.

Investing, now more than ever, is about controlling the controllable. You can’t control the markets. You can’t control the coronavirus. You can control your own behavior, although that requires making accurate, honest predictions about yourself.

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