During the final week of September, I had two positions, Anglo Asian Mining and Digital 9 Infrastructure Trust drop by 20%+ in a single session. Both rebounded strongly the next day – the proverbial “dead cat bounce” but remain heavily underwater for recent investors. Despite this, I am still holding both companies and in this […]
Anyone that runs their own portfolio will have heard the saying “bear markets turn traders into long term investors”. Outside of the obviously facetious element of the quote, it raises an interesting point about loss aversion – mainly that many retail investors seek to avoid crystallising losses in the hope of a share price rebound
As we leave 2022 behind, it’s traditional for many of us to review our performance over the last twelve months. I thoroughly enjoy reading these reviews and as usual there has been a wide spread of results across the board. A small number of investors I follow managed to turn a profit, my 11% loss
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
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.
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
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
When undertaking a recent review of my portfolio I was struck by the great number of logical contradictions in investing. I’ll be publishing this review in the next few weeks but the process of writing it made me consider all the various hurdles and challenges that investors face. For example; Patience is a great trait
To be a successful investor requires confidence in portfolio management – in particular, the strategy and companies which you have selected. This sounds like an obvious statement. After all, if you don’t believe in the performance of the companies then why would you invest in them? Having confidence in your portfolio management strategy often requires
Most people equate risk with either extreme volatility or with low quality assets. Retail investors are often told to avoid ‘risky’ investments to protect their money; to never even consider them (I can already feel the eyes of my readers narrowing in suspicion here, but bear with me!). By contrast, ‘high quality’ investments are often
Many years ago, I was travelling with a friend and his family to a holiday in Skegness as his Father gave him ’interview prep’ for an upcoming interview for a job at McDonald’s. My friend’s Father asked my friend whether or not his would ever act in a biased way against people and my friend
The last few weeks have been a great experiment to determine those that implement ’buy and hold’ as a strategy and those that have never actually had to do it during a market rout. Global indexes have collapsed on the coronavirus scare and panicky investors have been dumping shares left right and centre. For those
Last week, I wrote a post about portfolio management and signalled my intention to cover some of the elements in more detail in further posts. Since then, I’ve been thinking about the psychology of investing – I’ve written fairly extensively about the qualitative and quantitative analysis I do on companies, but relatively little about the
