By Laura Du Preez @ SmartAboutMoney* This article was first published on SmartAboutMoney.co.za, an initiative by the Association for Savings and Investment South Africa (ASISA). Investing in Bonds When you invest in a bond, you are lending money to the issuer of that...
How Will Equity Markets Perform in 2024? – By Joe Wiggins*
It is that time again when many “investment professionals” make “predictions” about how various markets will perform over the coming 12 months. The only purpose seems to be to allow us to look back in a year’s time and comment on how pointless such endeavours are....
How to resist the magnetism of “The Magnificent Seven”
Regular followers of the performance of stocks around the world will undoubtedly have heard of The Magnificent Seven (Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla) or The Enormous Eight (add NETFLIX into the mix above). For those who are unfamiliar with...
Why Do Thematic Funds Fail?
by Joe Wiggins (behaviouralinvestment.com) The enduring appeal of thematic funds can seem somewhat puzzling given their track record of delivering disappointing returns to investors (and sometimes worse). Yet from a behavioural angle, there is no puzzle to solve....
What can Sherlock Holmes teach investors?
What Can Sherlock Holmes Teach Investors? In the Sherlock Holmes novel ‘A Study in Scarlet’ the brilliant detective’s sidekick, Watson, is staggered to discover that Holmes is apparently not aware that the earth revolves around the sun. Watson cannot comprehend how an...
Short-term performance is everything (and the poison we should beware of)
Two years ago, “value investing” was dead. Now it is the obvious approach to adopt in the current environment. What has changed? Short-term performance. There are more captivating rationales but, underlying it all, are shifting performance patterns. These random and...
What We Should Remember About Bear Markets
What We Should Remember About Bear Markets* * There are many definitions of what makes a Bear Market. Simplistically, a bear market can be seen as a prolonged period of price declines in a stock, index, asset class etc… Sometimes this is viewed specifically as a price...
The 10 “Don’ts” for Fund Investors
Sometimes the path towards (investment) success is as much about what you should NOT do, as what you should do. Authors like Nassim Nicholas Taleb have highlighted that it is easier and more beneficial to stop negative activities than to attempt to identify new,...
Inflation: Your constant enemy has reared its head
At WPS we have always emphasised to our investors that, over time, inflation is your greatest enemy. Inflation is on the rise across the world and a lot of people are wondering what this may mean for their portfolios. Nick Curtin of Foord Asset Management has...
Beware the Sirens’ Call of short-term forecasts
Joe Wiggins recently asked over at behaviouralinvestment.com why it is that we all have such a fascination with short-term* forecasts of what a stock or market index may do. _____________________________________ What is short-term*? It is difficult to precisely define...