How many of us remember the events 2001 or 2008? Over the ten or so years since 2008, only in 2011 did we see a negative year through fears on the fragility of the global economy. In fact, over the last ten years it has been easy to forget that markets can go down, as well as up.

Two years ago, I was talking to a friend; the conversation went along the lines of, “2016 was good, but markets are going to fall so I am going to take my money out of the market and hold it in cash”. My friend then went on to explain that once the markets had reached the bottom, he would re-invest his money. I asked the question I always ask in these cases; what is the money for? He explained that the money was in a pension fund which he didn’t need and was planning to leave to his children.

a penny doubled every day for 31 days will be worth over £10 million at the end of the period Over the past few months I have produced several blogs looking at investing, market timing, and risk and volatility. To end this series I want to focus on the key message behind everything our financial […]

One of my favourite TV programmes is Only Fools and Horses. The immortal words “this time next year, Rodders, we’ll be millionaires!”, will forever be stuck in my head! In almost every episode Del had another money-making scheme; each time they never seemed to come to fruition. Ironically after all those years of scheming, the […]

A real lesson for investing is that for it to work, the process is pretty boring. You must be prepared to sit and wait for things to play out. Our brains are naturally wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. When there is so much information available to us, there is often a blur between […]

I’ve been sitting staring at a blank screen for half an hour trying to decide how I start this update. It’s been a fruitless attempt to boil down all that is currently playing out and that remains in flux, to establish a core narrative. Essentially what is the single central theme investors should be focused […]

I was asked the other day whether my job was essentially to be a paid gambler of another person’s money! It’s an uncomfortable question but one that deserved some thought.

There is something comforting about cash; we know if we have £100 in the bank and we don’t spend it, we will still have £100. Whereas, if we put £100 into the stock market we must accept that it could go down as well as up; although a loss is only a loss if we “cash” the investment in, it stills feels uncomfortable when we see money go down in value.

When markets are rising, there is a danger that we think (or secretly hope) that they will keep going up. The reality is that at some point stock markets will go down; we just don’t know when, by how much and how quickly they will recover (because what goes down will usually come back up).