Uncertainty Is Underrated

By |2024-03-01T09:47:04+00:00February 26th, 2024|Investment Planning, Investments|

“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

Common trading biases and how to overcome them

By |2024-01-05T09:55:35+00:00January 5th, 2024|Investment Planning, Investments|

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

Staying Invested Beats Timing the Market—Here’s the Proof

By |2023-11-17T09:28:05+00:00November 17th, 2023|Investment Planning, Investments|

“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

Morningstar CIO: Why Cash is Not the Answer

By |2023-11-03T09:30:14+00:00November 3rd, 2023|Investment Planning|

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

They Came, They Saw, They Incinerated Half Their Potential Returns

By |2023-10-20T08:38:03+00:00October 20th, 2023|Behavioural Finance, Investment Planning|

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

What Are Emerging and Frontier Markets?

By |2023-09-11T08:24:54+00:00September 11th, 2023|Investment Planning, Investments|

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

6 strengths of great advisers that clients may perceive as weaknesses

By |2023-07-28T08:54:25+00:00July 28th, 2023|Investment Planning, Investments|

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

Investors Expect Investment Returns Twice as High as FAs: Survey

By |2023-07-21T08:49:35+00:00July 21st, 2023|Investment Planning, Investments|

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

David Booth in the Financial Times: Why the Wisdom of the Market Crowd Beats AI

By |2023-07-07T09:22:55+00:00July 7th, 2023|Investment Planning|

Can artificial intelligence help pick stocks? More specifically, can investors use AI to determine the fair price of a stock or a bond? I bet a lot of people right now would say yes, given recent advances that allow for the processing of ever greater amounts of information. I think my AI is better than

This is Why You Stay the Course

By |2023-06-16T11:32:18+00:00June 16th, 2023|Financial Planning, Investment Planning|

Last year was one of the worst years ever for financial markets. Call it recency or loss aversion or some other Daniel Kahneman bias but for some reason, our brains are hard-wired to assume big losses will be followed by additional losses (just like we assume big gains will be followed by additional gains).1 The thing about big

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