Worldwide Financial Planning

I’ve yet to meet an investor who set out to buy high and sell low. But I’ve had plenty of readers here who nearly did exactly that between the irresponsible headlines and sleep. Behaviour, not spreadsheets, is where most investing outcomes are won or lost.

The day the market falls is the day your phone suddenly thinks it's a newsroom. Every headline wants a gasp, and every ‘pundit’ wants you to believe this time is different. My Director of Investment and I know from all our years of this experience - it rarely is.

Most wars hit economies through something far more boring than the dramatic headlines: plumbing. A pipe, a price, and a pause.

The attacks on Iran are being sold as a moment that “changes everything”, and maybe a justification for war. The economic story is simpler. It is mainly about the price of energy, and a bit about the cost of moving goods around the world.

Stay with it until the end to understand the mistakes which are easily made when choosing what funds you are invested into, and recognising you are being told that you are in the wrong fund, pushing you into a fund at a high, or taking you out at the low.

Readers of this column over the last 27 years will know of my deep concern of how customers are loaded unerringly into the wrong funds at the wrong time. We buy a pension and think, great, that’s a boring subject out of the way and it's ‘filed’ into the cupboard with the heating manual.