As U.S. markets have jolted up and down this year, investors may have looked at their balances and gasped, winced, screamed into a pillow, speed-dialed their finance people, sold stocks when they were low, sold stocks when they were high or all of the above.

It’s a natural reaction to feel panic and want to respond with action when you see your investments have shrunk by more than you are comfortable with, San Diego finance professionals said.

Lorenzo Sanchez, a partner with Pathview Wealth Advisors, has been having conversations about worst-case scenarios with his worried clients. They have been worrying that “all of our 401(k)s are going to zero,” and “this is the one that crashes everything” and “what does it matter if I save anymore?”

But his advice is to keep an eye on the horizon, not Wall Street.

“Our philosophy is always — we call it — ‘Stay the course.’ And it means just focus on the long term.” It’s wiser to expect the likely higher probability that things are going to be OK in the long run, even when things seem scary. He pointed to the large stock market drops of early April, when tariffs were announced. “When we’re in those (terrible) periods, it feels like it’s never going to get better. And here we are, three weeks later, the market is … back to where it was before the ‘Liberation Day,’ and it’s almost back to where it started this year.”

More than the market, what investors should fear is their own fear, he added.

“A lot of what we do is try and coach people through their emotions, and make sure they don’t make any drastic decisions in these times of panic, because that’s really where investors hurt themselves,” Sanchez said.

Here is advice from Sanchez and two other financial professionals about how to approach investing and financial planning during a volatile stock market.

Stick to your plan

Three experts all said the same thing: Stay focused on the long term.

“We advise our clients to stay the course when it comes to your long-term financial plan, and not to make knee-jerk reactions that will impact your long-term financial goal,” said Ammar Abuyousef, U.S. Bank’s market leader for San Diego.

That may have been especially hard in recent months, when stock prices were swinging up and down as investors reacted to uncertainty around tariffs and other economic policies.

At times in April, 75% of clients were expressing concern about the markets, said Alex Murray, who oversees wealth management in San Diego and Orange County at BNY Wealth.

But reacting to market drops could lead to losses during a recovery. From the day tariffs were announced at the start of the month until the end of April, the S&P 500 was down 0.7% — less than 1%, he said.

“It’s the emotional toll that volatility takes on investors, and if you are not convicted in your goals, it is a very dangerous place to be,” Murray said. “Because if you had sold that first week of April, you would have locked in losses of 15 to 20%, and odds are you would have missed the recovery, at least part of it, by the time you got back in. … Things are moving so quickly in markets, it’s very hard to time things correctly.”

Tune out noise

To stay the course, a little ignorance is bliss.

“If you were to have gone on vacation and left your phone at home for the month of April, you would have come home and thought, nothing really happened,” Murray said.

He urges people to “try to ignore the noise” and not track so much financial news on social media, TV or news outlets.

“We are in this crazy news cycle where every time you turn on CNBC, every time you pick up a newspaper, every time you get on X or Instagram or whatever, there’s so many headlines that seemingly are like market moving headlines,” Murray said. Those can feed anxiety.

Sanchez drew a comparison between financial cable TV news programs to ESPN focusing on big plays or highlight reels.

“Financial media is kind of like that — there’s a lot of fascination with the ‘big thing,’ … and what they want is for you to not change the channel,” he said. “So they’re going to tell you … that the world’s going to burn, that up next after this commercial, how to fix your 401(k) to profit off the Trump administration.”

Instead of checking the news every minute or hour, people who are paying for financial services should reach out to their financial professionals if they are feeling uneasy — and expect their professionals to reach out as well.

“If I were going to tell your reader one thing: You’re paying these financial advisers to do a job for you. You should expect to hear from them” when markets are topsy-turvy, Murray said.

Opportunities, maybe

Murray and Sanchez both talked about one silver lining of a volatile stock market.

“The reality is volatility is not the worst thing that can happen, because it sometimes creates some new opportunities,” Murray said.

Considering recent upswings — for example, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1,000 points on one day in late April — some people with money invested in the stock market may be tempted to try to take advantage of the next rally.

But timing the market doesn’t make a difference for most long-term investors, Sanchez said.

“These dips are entry points, but it should be entry points for assets you can leave for at least two years,” Sanchez said. “Are you going to get a little extra return? Sure, things are cheaper, but if you’re going to be invested for the next 40 years, it’s not going to make a mathematical difference.

“You’re not going to cut your retirement short two years by doing this, unless you’re talking about large sums of money in the millions of dollars.”

Tax planning in a down market presents a different kind of opportunity, added Sanchez, whose firm offers both financial advising and CPA services.

“When positions dip below a certain threshold where it makes financial sense, we sell that position and buy something similar. … (Then) you grab that loss for tax purposes,” he said. This technique is called tax loss harvesting. This allows a portfolio to stay fully invested. Losses can be applied against gains and, in some cases, income.

Market downturns can also be a good time for Roth IRA conversions from 401(k), IRA or other tax-deferred retirement accounts, by converting shares at discounted prices, he said.

“For example, if you have 100 shares at $100 and those drop to $80, you can convert the 100 shares and pay tax on just $8,000 ($80 x 100),” Sanchez added in an email.

What this means for investors: either less tax on the same amount of shares or more shares converted for the same amount of tax. “Additionally, when these investments recover, this growth will happen with the tax-free Roth IRA account,” he said.

Lesson learned: Seek stability

Some customers are “trying to protect what they worked hard for. They’re trying to protect their savings, but they also want to be thoughtful not to overreact,” Abuyousef said. One way to protect investments is to move money into investments with lower risk and lower returns.

“What we’ve been talking to a lot of our clients about is just, now is a time maybe to look into more safe and stable options, like a money market, which provides liquidity, or a certificate of deposit,” he said.

How should investors balance the knee-jerk reaction to pull money out of stocks and move it to investments they consider safer, versus staying the course? “The most important thing is that clients — consumers and businesses — understand that they have options to create a balance that works for them in the current environment to strike the right mix for their situation between risk, returns and liquidity,” Abuyousef answered in a follow-up email.

One more key way to offset turbulence is by having an emergency fund. “Have emergency savings — three to six months of spending. This is the time, if you don’t have a budget, to put a budget together,” Abuyousef said.

Sanchez shared this rule of thumb for when to invest or pull money from stocks, and it has nothing to do with the state of the market and everything to do with personal goals.

“Our blanket recommendation is no money should be in the market that you think you will need in the next 18 to 24 months,” Sanchez said. “Your emergency fund you don’t want in the market, your savings for a down payment you don’t want in the market. If you know you’re going to buy a car and you need $10,000, don’t put it in the market. The extra 10% or 8% that you’re going to get is not worth the 15% that you could lose and not be able to buy your car or close on your home.”

Sanchez and Murray recalled the global financial crisis of nearly two decades ago.

Murray said unlike in 2008, the recent tumult is “is more related to policy than to the strength of the underlying companies in the equity markets.”

A takeaway from back then underscores Sanchez’s key advice today: Do not make decisions in a panic.

“There’s so many stories of people in 2008 going to cash and then being too scared to come back in. And some of them haven’t recovered yet. That’s 20 years later, almost. So we try and focus on the long term… and know that eventually it’s going to be fine. Before you know it, it will be fine.

“And luckily it has recovered,” he said, of April’s markets. “I don’t know that it will recover forever. There’s always another downturn right around the corner, but for now it feels a little bit better.”