BlackRock’s Larry Fink warns against market timing, says missing best days can halve returns

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink urged investors to resist the temptation to time markets, arguing that staying invested through periods of turmoil has historically delivered far stronger returns.

“Over time, staying invested has mattered far more than getting the timing right,” Fink wrote in his annual chairman’s letter released Monday. “Some of the market’s strongest days came amid the most unsettling headlines.”

He pointed to the past two decades as a stark example: every dollar invested in the S&P 500 grew more than eightfold. But investors who missed just the 10 best days over that stretch would have earned less than half as much.

The warning from the billionaire comes as markets are increasingly driven by rapid shifts in sentiment tied to geopolitics, inflation and technological disruption. Stocks rallied sharply Monday after President Donald Trump said the U.S. and Iran have held talks and that he was halting strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure.

“The danger is that we focus so much on the noise that we forget what actually matters,” Fink wrote. “The forces behind today’s headlines have been building for a long time. The old model of global capitalism is fracturing. Countries are spending enormous sums to become self-reliant — in energy, in defense, in technology.”

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with a $14 trillion in assets under management at the end of 2025.

Fink also warned that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence could amplify inequality, enriching those who already own assets while leaving others further behind.

“The massive wealth created over the past several generations flowed mostly to people who already owned financial assets. And now AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale,” he said.

Companies tied to AI have driven a significant share of recent equity market gains, concentrating returns among a relatively small group of firms and their shareholders.