24/7 Wall St. ran a piece this week arguing that one overlooked ETF sidesteps a specific risk most people haven't thought about: the possibility that AI's true costs are hiding in the accounting, and that buy-and-hold investors in the wrong funds could pay for it over the next decade. You can read their argument here.

The concern is a fair one. A lot of the AI build-out is showing up as depreciation schedules and capitalized spending rather than current expenses, and the gap between what a company reports and what it actually spent can stay hidden for years. If some of those data centers age faster than the accountants assumed, the write-downs arrive later, all at once, and the shareholders eat them. Individual stock pickers take that risk directly. The rest of us just need to make sure we're spread out enough that no single ledger trick can ruin us.

That brings me to the part where I disappoint everyone hoping for a secret ticker. The fund I'd buy today and not look at until 2036 is the same boring answer I've been giving for years: a broad total market index fund, something like Vanguard's Total Stock Market ETF. Not because it's clever. Because it's the only kind of fund where being wrong about any one company, or any one accounting fad, costs you almost nothing.

Do the math on it. If the market returns 8 percent a year, $10,000 in a total market fund becomes about $21,600 in ten years without you adding a dime. If one AI giant inside that fund turns out to have been capitalizing its way to fantasy profits, it drags on the total by a rounding error. Own that same company outright and you've got a decade of your savings riding on a footnote in a 10-K.

The 24/7 Wall St. piece frames its pick as protection against accounting tricks, and I'd frame it a different way. You don't need a special fund to protect you from creative accounting. You need enough holdings that creativity stops mattering. Three or four thousand stocks do that job just fine, with an expense ratio under a tenth of a percent and no manager deciding which ledger to trust this quarter.

The "don't look at it again until 2036" part is the advice I actually want you to keep. Checking your account daily doesn't improve returns; it only improves your chances of doing something dumb in a down week. I've lived through the crashes in 1987, 2000, and 2008, and the investors I know who did best were mostly the ones who found the market boring on purpose.

One question worth asking yourself: could you go six months without logging in? If the answer makes you nervous, that's information.

As always, this is my perspective, not professional financial advice. But patience and consistency have beaten cleverness for forty years running, and I see no reason this decade gets to be different.