BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink speaks during an interview with CNBC at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, USA on January 15, 2026.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink urged investors to resist the temptation to time the markets, arguing that staying invested during turbulent times has historically resulted in far higher returns.
“Over time, staying invested has become far more important than timing,” Fink wrote in his annual letter to the chief executive, released Monday. “Some of the market’s strongest days have coincided with the most troubling headlines.”
As a stark example, he pointed to the past two decades: every dollar invested in the S&P 500 grew more than eightfold. But investors who missed just the top 10 days during that period would have earned less than half as much.
The billionaire’s warning comes as markets are increasingly driven by rapid swings in sentiment related to geopolitics, inflation and technological disruption. Stocks rallied sharply on Monday after President Donald Trump said the U.S. and Iran had held talks and that he would stop attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure.
“The danger is that we focus so much on the noise that we forget what really matters,” Fink wrote. “The forces behind today’s headlines have been building for a long time. The old model of global capitalism is crumbling. Countries are spending enormous amounts of money to become self-sufficient – in energy, in defense, in technology.”
BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with $14 trillion in assets under management at the end of 2025.
Fink also warned that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence could increase inequality and enrich those who already have wealth while leaving others even further behind.
“The enormous wealth created in recent generations largely flowed to people who already owned financial assets. And now AI threatens to repeat that pattern on an even larger scale,” he said.
AI-related companies have accounted for a significant portion of recent stock market gains, concentrating returns among a relatively small group of companies and their shareholders.
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