Many people start out managing their own investments. But as their earnings and assets grow, their financial needs and challenges become more complex—and continuing to go it alone could prove costly in terms of investing miscues. Consider three common mistakes that can reduce returns and increase anxiety: 1. Trying to Time the Market Investors may
Sometimes it is easy to distinguish luck from skill. Other times, maybe it’s not so straightforward. Let’s try a simple thought experiment designed to calibrate our appreciation of the problem. Let’s say someone calls 20 coin tosses in a row correctly; is that luck or skill? I think we’d all agree it was luck. However,
“A wave of new scientific discoveries reveals that learning to lean into uncertainty in times of rapid change is a promising antidote to mental distress.” –Maggie Jackson, New York Times1 For many people, uncertainty is something to avoid or at least mitigate. But what about the positive things that uncertainty can bring? Without it, there would
Have you ever found yourself meticulously preparing a trading strategy, only to second-guess your decisions when it comes time to execute? If so, it’s possible that you’ve succumbed—without even knowing it—to a trading bias. Trading biases are a form of cognitive bias, a term first coined in 1972 by Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman to describe
“Don’t try to time the market.” This advice has been passed down often by successful investors like Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Jack Bogle, and Peter Lynch through the decades. But has this mantra held up in recent decades? After all, investors boast access to more and more timely information than ever and they can trade
Interest bearing bank accounts and very short term fixed income securities now offer their highest returns for decades. This is welcome and means that savers are no longer being penalised for being thrifty or risk averse. For over a decade, cash offered miserly returns, driven down by the drop in the Bank of England Base
In recent weeks, we’ve written several articles about how a strategy of doing nothing –eschewing trading and letting investments ride – would have fared. To sum up, we found a do-nothing strategy would have improved the risk-adjusted performance of the S&P 500 and S&P/TSX Composite index’s holdings. What we didn’t examine was whether a do-nothing approach would
Emerging and frontier markets are often seen by investors as exciting and risky. In this article we try to pin down an investing universe world that spans, at least alphabetically, from Brazil and Vietnam. Organisations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations may have slightly different methodologies for explaining
In this post I will be sharing my thoughts on the strengths that great advisers demonstrate, which some clients may deem as weaknesses. Most mature money management and financial strategies are counterintuitive and against conventional wisdom. Modern media and access to ‘free’ information is maybe our biggest threat and our client’s most destructive influence. The
Financial advisors looking to bring on new clients have a receptive audience following the recent economic turmoil — but they may need to temper some expectations, according to a recent survey. Having to face inflation has made 64% of investors see the importance of professional financial advice, Natixis Investment Managers says it found in a survey of
