There’s a famous, possibly apocryphal, finding that the best-performing brokerage accounts belong to people who forgot they had them. Whether or not the exact study is real, the lesson is: most investors hurt themselves by doing things.

Every tweak is a chance to buy high on excitement, sell low on fear, and rack up fees and taxes along the way. The market’s long-term gains are real, but they arrive lumpily and unpredictably — and the people who try to dodge the bad days usually miss the best ones too, because they cluster together.

So the Hammock Fund default is deliberate inactivity: pick a sensible allocation, automate it, and then leave it alone for years. Not because you’re lazy — because restraint is, statistically, one of the highest-return skills an ordinary investor has. The hardest part of this strategy is resisting the urge to have a strategy.