Good morning.

Like almost everyone, I've been transfixed by the news about the war in Ukraine. It's hard to read or watch or think about anything else, because suddenly everything is connected to it -- not just our markets, but our hearts and our minds. In my spare time I've even started rereading Vasily Grossman's brilliant epic novel Life and Fate, about Russia and Ukraine during World War II.

I have found myself thinking about one other thing recently, though: a glass bowl.

Archeologists working in the Dutch city of Nijmegen recently unearthed a Roman glass bowl in flawless condition. Even though it had lain buried underground for centuries, it is unbroken, uncracked, unchipped, as pristinely sapphire as the day it was made some 2,000 years ago.

That got me thinking: What does it take for a delicate creation to survive for two millennia?

You can't say strength or durability, because this piece of glass would have shattered from the slightest bump or fall or heavy pressure.

Two factors must have enabled it to survive. The first is forethought: Someone who cherished this bowl and wanted it to endure must have placed it with care where it would have a chance of staying safe and secure.

The second is luck. The glass kilns of the Roman empire produced countless objects, nearly all of which have come down to us today -- if they survived at all -- with chips and cracks and other damage. This spectacular bowl survived intact because of some perfect, imponderable combination of circumstances -- just the right kind of soil at exactly the proper depth, not too cold, not too wet, not too hot, not too dry, away from wells or wagon wheels, nowhere near fields turned by plows or foundation walls dug deep into the ground.

Investment portfolios, too, are the delicate creations of human hands.

We can use forethought to design them for durability by diversifying, keeping costs low, minimizing taxes and maximizing simplicity.

For portfolios to survive for decades and even centuries, though, we need luck. Markets themselves sometimes don't survive.

As I wrote last weekend, the St. Petersburg stock exchange shut down in 1917, and Russian stocks stopped trading for the next three-quarters of a century. Other major markets, including Germany and Japan, have shut down for years on end.

I vividly remember visiting Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, in 1992 and seeing an impressive block of offices called the Exchange Buildings. The structure once had housed a bustling stock exchange, founded in the 1890s, and later grew even larger than shown in the photo below. Then it faded into decades of oblivion.

I certainly don't expect that the U.S. stock market is about to disappear.

But, no matter how much we plan and how well we design our portfolios, we still need luck if our money is to endure for decades or even longer. Our wealth is at least as fragile as glass.

All this reminds me of the power of seeing yourself as a winner in what Warren Buffett calls "the ovarian lottery."

Born in another time or another place, you might well have had the ability to invest in stocks pulled right out from under you, or suffered the ravages of hyperinflation.

Overconfidence is the mortal enemy of investing success, and remembering how lucky you are is one of the best ways I know to keep your head from swelling.

War wreaks havoc with markets, too.

Look what happened to the price of nickel in London on Tuesday:

As you can see, on Tuesday the price of this basic industrial metal, which has been traded for decades, more than doubled in a day:

The wild move dealt Chinese nickel giant Tsingshan Holding Group a trading loss of $8 billion​, according to my colleagues Jing Yang, Rebecca Feng and Joe Wallace.

Russia is the fourth-biggest producer of nickel in the world, according to the Nickel Institute. The metal is an essential ingredient in stainless steel and in the batteries used by many electric vehicles. If prices stay high, inflation will have another channel.

The larger lesson: Modern markets don't move in isolation. Disruptions to one asset will short-circuit others. As the war grinds on, these dislocations may spread farther and loom larger than anyone suspects at first.

Are your middle-school or high-school children playing the Stock Market Game, Capitol Hill Challenge or other investing competitions? (Or, if you're a student yourself, are you playing?) What do you think of the game?

Just hit reply to this email to share your thoughts.

Albert Einstein, along with Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, is one of the most-often quoted people in history. And, like them, he's also one of the most-often misquoted.

How many times have you read or heard that Einstein said "Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe"?

There's no evidence he ever said that, according to Einstein archivist Alice Calaprice. There's no way he ever said that, according to Roy Glauber, a theoretical physicist who knew Einstein well. Years ago, at an academic meeting, I met Prof. Glauber (who died in 2018). I asked him if he thought Einstein would have said that. He burst out laughing and exclaimed, "Why would Einstein have thought an exponential function is interesting, let alone powerful?"

One financial quip attributed to Einstein does appear to be authentic:

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is income taxes.”

According to QuoteInvestigator.com, Einstein made this remark to his accountant and family friend Leo Mattersdorf, adding that his theory of relativity was "easy" by comparison.

Einstein, like many Americans, was perennially frustrated by the complexity of tax returns -- even in an era when they were much simpler than today's.

Seventy-eight years ago this week, on March 15, 1944, The Wall Street Journal ran this op-ed by former presidential adviser Raymond Moley:

Note that Moley claimed that Einstein "said in an interview at Princeton that he hired a philosopher to fill it out for him."

Holy Moley, was that a stretch. On March 11, 1944, newspapers around the U.S. (although not the WSJ) carried an Associated Press article in which Einstein was asked how he felt about navigating all the questions on his tax return.

The great physicist replied: "This is a question too difficult for a mathematician. It should be asked of a philosopher." He didn't say anything about hiring a philosopher to do his taxes -- which sounds as ludicrous as hiring a tax preparer to teach him about Aristotle or Confucius.

Moley, who had helped Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt organize the original "Brain Trust" that created the policies behind the New Deal, turned against those policies in the mid-1930s after he left the administration. He became a leading proponent of lower taxes -- and evidently, at least in this one case, a bit footloose with the facts.

As Yogi Berra said, "I really didn't say everything I said!" And neither did Einstein.

Be well and invest well,

Jason

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I'm off next week. Our next issue will celebrate the arrival of spring.

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When you leave it to chance, then all of a sudden you don’t have any more luck.
—Pat Riley