Reuters published a piece today that lays out something I have been grumbling about for the better part of two years. A tidal wave of fast money is bending stock prices in directions that have very little to do with what companies actually earn or produce. You can read the full Reuters analysis here.

Markets have always had speculation. Going back to the late 1980s, when I first opened a brokerage account and started learning how all this works, I have seen plenty of speculative frenzies come and go. What feels different now is the speed and the sheer volume of money chasing short-term moves.

The Reuters piece points out that options activity and derivatives positioning are driving price swings that look irrational on the surface, regardless of underlying business fundamentals. If you want to understand why a stock can move sharply on no real news, the column is worth reading carefully.

For those of you who own broad index funds and reinvest your dividends, here is what matters. None of this changes the long-term math. The approach that makes sense to me is simple: a company that grows earnings over time and pays a rising dividend will compound your wealth over decades, regardless of what fast money does to the share price on any given Tuesday. That is my perspective, not a guarantee, and real-world variables like fees and taxes always play a role.

What fast money does change, from where I sit, is the experience of holding through it. The volatility that comes with short-term speculation gets harder to stomach. You see a sharp drop in a week and your gut tells you to sell. That discomfort is part of how the fast money crowd profits.

My colleague Cassie Welch sees it differently, and we have gone back and forth on this plenty of times. Her view is that the fast money crowd creates opportunities for patient buyers, and she has a point. Price dislocations mean someone is selling a good asset at a bad price. My counterargument is that most individual investors are not equipped to time those dislocations, and I believe the attempt usually costs more than the opportunity saves.

The boring path still works, in my experience. Buy the whole market through a low-cost total stock market fund. Diversify broadly, including outside your home market, because holding assets that are not all moving on the same wave can help smooth out the ride. Reinvest your dividends. Ignore the noise.

The fast money crowd will keep doing what they do. Your job is to make sure they are doing it with someone else's portfolio, not yours.

As always, I am sharing perspective built from decades of managing my own money. I am not a financial advisor. This is not professional advice. Talk to someone who is licensed before making decisions about your portfolio.