Your Portfolio Is Getting Hammered by Tariffs — Here Are 4 Moves to Make Right Now

If you've checked your brokerage account lately, you already know the sinking feeling you are left with. One tariff headline drops, futures tumble, and suddenly that long-term plan you felt good about starts looking a lot less certain. To add insult to injury, the Iran War is still raging, wreaking havoc on the markets. It would seem that the situation in 2026 has been defined by whiplash. Investors are left with the choice of either panic-sell or do nothing at all, and both can be equally costly.

However, not everything is bleak and there is some good news out there. Volatility isn't the end of your strategy. Think of it as a stress test, and there are concrete moves you can make right now to protect what you have and position yourself for what comes next.

When war anxiety is driving the market, not all stocks take the same beating. Defensive sectors, like healthcare, utilities, and consumer staples, tend to hold up far better than tech or industrials during tariff-driven selloffs. People still pay their electricity bills and buy groceries regardless of what's happening at the border.

If your portfolio is heavily weighted toward growth or cyclical stocks, now is a good time to rebalance toward companies with steady cash flows and pricing power. Think large-cap consumer staples, utility ETFs, or healthcare giants that aren't heavily dependent on global supply chains. These won't make you rich overnight, but they can act as a cushion while the volatility plays out. There are a number of defensive stocks worth considering when markets get rocky.

A down market is painful, but it comes with a silver lining if you're in a taxable account. Tax-loss harvesting lets you sell positions that are underwater to realize a capital loss, which you can then use to offset gains elsewhere in your portfolio and reduce your overall tax bill.

The strategy works like this: you sell the losing position, lock in the loss for tax purposes, and immediately reinvest in a similar (but not identical) asset so you stay in the market. Just be aware of the IRS wash-sale rule, which disallows the loss if you buy back the same or a "substantially identical" security within 30 days.

In a year where plenty of positions are deep in the red, this is one of the most underused tools available to retail investors. It won't fix your portfolio, but it can soften the blow at tax time.

Investing in crypto in times like these may sound counterintuitive. After all, crypto is volatile too. But there is logic behind it. One of the arguments gaining traction among institutional investors is that Bitcoin and other major digital assets are increasingly behaving like a non-correlated asset class. When traditional markets are rattled by policy uncertainty, tariffs, central bank moves, geopolitical friction, crypto sometimes moves to its own beat.

Even more importantly, crypto sits outside the direct line of fire of trade policy. Tariffs don't apply to digital assets. That makes a small, disciplined allocation worth considering as part of a diversified strategy rather than a speculative moonshot, something that outlets like CryptoManiaks have been recommending for a long time.

The key word is small. Most financial advisors suggest keeping crypto to somewhere between 2% and 10% of a portfolio, depending on your risk tolerance. Stick to the major, more liquid assets. Bitcoin and Ethereum have the deepest markets and the most institutional backing. The fact is that cryptocurrency has a role in modern portfolios, especially with institutional adoption reshaping the risk profile of the asset class.

Trying to time the bottom of a tariff-driven selloff is nearly impossible. Even professional fund managers rarely get it right. A smarter approach for most investors is dollar-cost averaging (DCA). Commit a fixed dollar amount to the market at regular intervals, regardless of what prices are doing.

The logic is simple. When prices are down, your fixed amount buys more shares. When prices recover, those extra shares pay off. Over time, DCA tends to lower your average cost per share compared to making one large lump-sum investment at the wrong moment.

If the tariff drama has you paralyzed at the sidelines, DCA is your permission slip to get back in, without betting everything on a single moment. Set it up automatically through your brokerage so emotions don't lead you astray.

Tariff headlines aren't going away anytime soon, and predicting when the uncertainty resolves is a fool's errand. What you can control is how your portfolio is positioned to weather it.

The measures we outlined aren't glamorous moves, but they're the kind of disciplined decisions that separate investors who come out of volatility stronger from those who don't. Pick the ones that fit your situation and act before the next headline drops.