“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” Matthew 7: 24-25
It was the Fourth of July and it was hot. The Kingsport parade comes right by our office at 1402 East Center Street every year, a few hundred yards before the grandstand. People gather on our lawn and our front deck to watch it. This year we tried something new. My nephew Matt runs our marketing and media and he is also a fine musician, so he set up on the deck and played while the crowd came in. When the parade turned up Center Street and reached our corner, he played the Star-Spangled Banner. He timed it exactly right. We handed out close to eighty bottles of water before the last float went by. I have thought about that morning more than once since.
My father founded this firm in 1966, though we did not land on this corner until 1987, thirty-nine years ago now, which is arithmetic I did not enjoy doing. Stand out front of our office and look around you. There is a church directly across the street. Catty-corner is the law office my brother John built and practiced out of until he passed away in 2022. John was Matt’s father, which means the young man playing the national anthem on our deck that morning was doing it within sight of his dad’s front door. Three or four hundred yards down the road, where the parade ends, is Dobyns-Bennett High School. My mother and father went to school there. So did we all: my brothers, my children, John’s children, Bob’s children. The men in this family played football on Friday nights in J. Fred Johnson Stadium, maroon and gray, Indians through and through. My brother Bob taught and coached there for a career; he has stepped away from football but is still coaching track. The road that runs behind that stadium and up to the field house is named Bob Bingham Boulevard. All of this inside a quarter mile.
We did not plan any of that. It happened one decision at a time, because people who stay put and keep showing up eventually become part of the geography. But I do not think it is incidental to how we do business either. A football field is the most honest meritocracy I know of. Nobody out there cares where you came from or who your people are. There are no quotas. There is only the question of how this team wins and who gives it the best chance, and the answer gets settled in front of everyone on Friday night. You learn discipline there, and teamwork, and the particular toughness of getting knocked down and getting up for the next play. And then, win or lose, you line up again the next week. That is not a bad description of the market. It is a fair description of life. And it is an honest description of this firm, where the family and the business have never been two separate things. They are the same thing, and they always have been.
That is not a small thing on the Fourth of July, and it was not a small thing on this one. Two hundred and fifty years of a country and sixty years of a firm, both standing on the same ground: principles held on purpose, for a long time, by people willing to be inconvenienced by them. In July I wrote at some length about the Declaration of Independence and about the Judeo-Christian convictions the founders built it on, grounded in their own words rather than anyone’s interpretation of them. That piece is still available to anyone who wants to read deeper. But the argument does not need much explaining. You could see it on our corner that morning, in the water we handed out, in the music Matt played, in the firm that carries my father’s name.
“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’” Isaiah 6:8
I said a moment ago that a country and a firm can stand on the same ground. I want to spend some time on what that ground actually is, because it turns out to have a great deal to do with how we manage money.
Start with the plain version. You hired this firm to do a job. You are the one climbing, building the thing, retiring on it, handing it to your children. We are on the rope. Our assignment is to get you up the mountain and, harder still, back down it and safely across to the next generation. Everything else is detail.
Which means the only real test of a firm is what it does on the days when showing up is expensive. Anyone can be steady in a good quarter. So let me tell you about three of ours, not because they are interesting on their own, but because of what our clients needed from us while they were happening.
This firm opened on April 1, 1966. My father and Norman Hensley left secure employment to start Bingham & Hensley. Both of them had young families. My mother blessed the decision and became a full partner in whatever came of it, which in 1966 was not obvious. They opened in a bear market, which is to say that the very first families who trusted them were already watching their savings shrink on the day they signed on. Two men with no cushion and everything to lose spent that first year telling frightened people to stay the course. I do not know that anyone told them it was a poor time to start a business, and I am not certain it would have mattered.
We moved to 1402 E. Center Street in 1987. That October the Dow fell more than twenty-two percent in a single day, the worst day in the history of American markets, before or since. New address, new overhead, and the floor gave way underneath the whole industry within weeks of the move. Nobody in this office spent that autumn admiring the new building. The phone rang and rang, and on the other end of it were people who thought their life savings had just evaporated, and the job was to sit with each one of them until they could think clearly again. We stayed. So did they.
Then came 2022. In roughly a hundred days, between the middle of June and the first week of October, I lost my vision, we lost my mother, and we lost my brother John. Markets fell about eighteen percent that year, which at the time was the least of it, except that it was not the least of it for our clients. They needed a firm that answered the phone. In the middle of all of that my son Jake came into the business. He was twenty-seven years old. He came in to help hold the family and the family business together at the same time, and I do not recall anyone asking him whether the timing suited him.
What you are entitled to expect
Here is the part I want to say carefully, because it is the whole point. Our clients did not need to know about any of that, and in the truest sense it was none of their concern. You did not hire us to admire our perseverance. You hired us to look after what you spent a lifetime building. Whatever is happening on our side of the desk, a bad night, a hard diagnosis, a funeral, a business under strain, is ours to carry, not yours. It buys us no allowance. The standard does not move.
So we show up. We do the hard things and we do them on the days we do not feel like it, because that is what being trusted with someone’s life’s work requires. That is the promise, and it is the only one worth making: you will get our best, every day, regardless of what it is costing us to give it.
Three moments, three generations, the same answer each time. It would be easy to say we have just had the right people at the right times. But that is not really it. What we have had is a set of principles laid down before any of us arrived and held onto on purpose ever since, and people raised inside them, so when the moment came the answer was already settled.
That is the difference between a hero and a steward. The hero of this story is the family on the mountain. The steward is the one on the rope who has already decided, long before the weather turned, that he is not letting go. He has been decided for, by the people who came before and by the God they answered to. When Isaiah heard the question, he did not survey the conditions and weigh his options. He said, here am I, send me. That is not courage in the dramatic sense. It is obedience, and it is obligation, and if you have been brought up right it does not feel like either one. It just feels like what you do.
America was built the same way, and that is not a stretch. The founders did not invent the convictions they wrote down in 1776; they inherited them and had the nerve to put their names underneath them. Every generation since has faced a moment where the country needed somebody to step into a gap, and every generation has produced people who did it without much fuss about it, not because Americans are naturally braver than anyone else, but because the foundation was laid well and it kept forming the people who stood on it. Two hundred and fifty years later the house is still standing.
There is an old line that hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, and weak men make hard times. I think that is true as far as it goes. But it leaves out the part that matters most, which is what gets handed down in between.
Why this is a market conversation and not a sermon
Here is where it comes back to your money. For most of the last two years the fashionable argument has been that America’s best days as an investment are behind it, that the deficits, the politics, and the valuations had finally caught up with us, and that capital would go looking elsewhere. It was given a name: the Sell America trade. It did not happen. In the first four months of this year roughly $1.4 trillion flowed into American assets. Seven American companies are now worth nearly as much as the entire stock markets of China and Japan combined.
Money is not sentimental and it does not vote. It goes where property rights are enforced, where contracts are honored, where courts are predictable, where capital can be raised and businesses can fail without the whole system seizing up. Those are not economic advantages in the technical sense. They are moral commitments that were written down a long time ago by people who believed rights came from God rather than from government, and they have been maintained at real cost ever since. The market premium America enjoys is the compound interest on that decision. You cannot buy it and you cannot fake it, and countries that have tried to skip the foundation and build the house anyway have generally found out why that does not work.
None of this means the road ahead is smooth. It never has been. Valuations are full in places, the concentration at the top of the index is real, and rates are still finding their way back to something historically normal after a very long stretch of being held down. We will have quarters that are unpleasant. We have had sixty years of them, and the firm has been positioned for them every time, because we do not build portfolios on the assumption that nothing will go wrong.
To put that 1987 day in today’s terms, a drop like Black Monday would take almost twelve thousand points off the Dow in a single session. And yet the market finished that very year in the black. The worst day in the history of American markets, and the people who stayed the course still ended the year ahead of where they started. That is the whole case in one number. The headline is almost never the story, and the plan almost always beats the panic.
What it does mean is that the case for owning America has not weakened, and the case for abandoning a plan because a headline told you to has not improved.
In 1966 my father did not wait for good conditions before he started answering the phone. In 1987 we did not unwind because the worst day in market history landed on the month we moved here. In 2022 Jake stepped into the middle of the hardest year this family has had, and went to work for people who were frightened about their own. In each case the discipline came from the same place: not from confidence about the next twelve months, but from a foundation that was laid well and has not moved.
The rain came down, the streams rose, the winds blew and beat against that house. And it did not fall.