Six months into 2022 and like most private investors I’m finding the markets increasingly challenging to handle. After 2021’s fantastic returns of 24% my portfolio is currently down around 10% year-to-date. That gives me a truly wonderful feeling considering inflation is running at 10% – meaning that I’ve effectively lost all my gains from last […]
A recent scroll through my Twitter feed uncovered one of two responses to the recent market volatility. Firstly, that the world is ending, we’re all doomed and accordingly that someone’s portfolio has been smashed to smithereens. Alternatively, that this is all temporary, that anyone urging caution is an idiot, and that investors really ought to
Last week, I was invited to guest star on the Twin Petes Investing Podcast Episode 73, starring alongside my good friend Peter Higgins and acting as a temporary stand-in for the missing Pete “WheelieDealer” due to health problems. The episode was an absolute delight to film, and despite having relatively little warning of the invitation,
Guest Starring on the Twin Petes Investing Podcast! Read More »
One of the most common statements I hear from fellow investors is the idea that they are ‘long-term’ investors and that short-term price fluctuations do not concern them. In today’s blog, I want to unpack the idea of what it means to be a long-term investor and consider some of the challenges and benefits that
A few years ago, I wrote an article about the importance of financial literacy and education. At the time, I listed a number of sources such as podcasts as being key to my own self-directed programme of education. Today, I want to write about one of my favourite sources, both from an enjoyment and education
For the first time in a while, I picked up a paper copy of the Financial Times this weekend. Although I’m a regular reader of the paper, I tend to consume the digital copy more than the paper version these days and it was quite a decadent treat to enjoy leafing through the original format.
Blimey. Well, I don’t know if crazy is the right word for it but if you’d told me back in 2019 that over the next two years I would face a multi-year global pandemic, a stock market rout, a six month recovery following by ever more rich valuations, then a collapse of global supply chains,
Earlier this year I was speaking to a friend about investing and felt like I was standing in front of a metaphorical firehose of investing noise. “Henry, have you read about Bitcoin? I made 30% last year on it!” “I made a bet on a gold miner, they have access to three mines but the
This blog is probably a surprise to any readers who read my site regularly as I haven’t made a post in over six months and have been fairly absent from Twitter. Where to begin? Well, I should start with the exciting news; I got married! Not only did I get married in October but my
So, a little later than I expected, I’m pleased to publish the next article in my series about Investment Idea Generation. In the first article in this series, I wrote about the topic of selecting investment goals, different types of assets and asset classes, and the different investment vehicles available to investors looking for alternatives
In my last article, I indicated that I wanted to cover investment idea generation for an investment portfolio in more detail. The very first stage of building a portfolio of investments, far before investment idea generation, is to define your investment goals. For the purposes of this exercise, let us define our goal as income
Listening to the latest Twin Pete’s Investing podcast (which can be found here or here for those heathens that aren’t already dedicated followers), I was particularly interested by a segment where they discussed transparency of investors presenting ‘research’ on social media. The reason I was so interested was because of my own management of this
The Narrative Fallacy is the idea that humans are predisposed towards believing a good story over understanding the facts of a situation. We are often drawn towards less desirable investments simply because they have a good story and then use the story to convince ourselves of the merits of the company in which we are
The last few weeks have reinforced the importance of portfolio managers and private investors having a solid process to protect capital and prevent themselves from opening position which are, frankly, only ever going to lose them money. For those of you that haven’t seen the headlines, a number of tiny US companies such as Bed,
In 2008-09 we had a financial crisis; a credit crisis that required immense levels of government intervention in global financial markets. In the case of the UK, this included hundreds of billions of pounds in quantitative easing and an effective elimination of positive interest rates. Several UK banks required direct injections of capital and one
Sovereign Debt Crisis: The economic consequences of COVID-19 Read More »
