Health, Wealth, and a Fulfilled Life In today’s fast-paced world, our focus often tilts heavily towards building wealth, leading us to overlook the vital importance of looking after our health. In the relentless pursuit of financial success, we tend to neglect both our physical and mental wellbeing. This skewed allocation of time and effort towards…
The Familiar Tale of Investment Folly We find ourselves trapped in an all-too-familiar plot, witnessing a recurring phenomenon where investors fall prey to chasing outsize returns, only to be left disappointed and burnt. The ARK Innovation ETF, once the largest actively traded ETF, serves as our protagonist in this narrative. Its meteoric rise during the…
The Surprises From the First Half of 2023 In a recent blog the insightful Charlie Bilello highlighted some of the surprises for the first half of 2023. A tough 2022 wore investors down and consensus sentiment turned very bullish. The recession that never came In December 2022, there was widespread agreement that the U.S. economy…
The Dunning-Kruger Effect – When Little knowledge is Dangerous Humans exhibit a cognitive bias known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which leads individuals lacking skills or knowledge in a specific domain to draw erroneous conclusions while remaining oblivious to their own inadequacies. Novices often overestimate their ability and competence, while experienced and skilled individuals tend to…
Investing vs. Trading: Understanding the Distinction for Financial Success Are you an investor or a trader? These two approaches represent fundamentally different mindsets and strategies. Failing to understand the difference can lead to disastrous short-term decisions made by long-term investors. Historical data shows that when markets fluctuate, long-term investors often regress to trading behaviour with…
The Rand’s Perfect Storm It is not perchance that we have maintained a significant overweight exposure to offshore assets during the first half of 2023. As much as it pains us to admit, there are moments in time when one concurs with Magnus’s views and this has been one of those periods. From around R17,00…
Understanding the Concept of Risk for Long-Term Investors If you don’t have a proper understanding of what risk means as a long-term investor you will struggle to have the composure required for long-term success. What Risk is Not Contrary to common belief, equity market exposure is not the primary risk for investors. Without exposure to…
Persistence Score Card: Fund Performance vs. Investor Behaviour Even when we are warned, we still don’t act rationally and in our own best interest. The phrase “past performance is no guarantee of future results” is communicated to investment clients as financial advisors are compelled to disclose this from a regulatory perspective. Our collective behaviour evidences…
“Worrying” hijacks your self-care agenda! How you relate to doubt in your inner world can cause chaos in your external world. How many times have you worried about events that never occurred? Very little of what we fear and worry about actually ever happens and hardly ever in the fashion we expected. We worry about…
How will AI impact the future of Financial Advice? The hype is real! Machines with human level intelligence seems to be with us. Artificial Intelligence (AI) solves problems that require the kind of reasoning that we associate with human intelligence. AI learns from past processes and goes beyond normal algorithms which are formulas for processing…