Pierre Taljaard and I share our best quotes on investing. We noticed there were three common themes – patience, compound interest, and simplicity.

The world breaks about once every decade - history rhymes, as they say, and you have to be prepared for that. This is the unvarnished truth about investing, and I’m going to explain it directly, because I really want you to understand it.

It might seem like an unusual topic, but this concerns our final years – paying for a care or nursing home. It’s also a particularly emotionally-charged subject of financial planning to talk about, and there’s a lot of behavioural and human errors and misconceptions around it. 

2018 has been a choppy, volatile and potentially a negative year in most of the major stock markets of the world, although it’s the first time that’s happened in eight or nine years.

In response, it seemed like a good opportunity to address the mistakes that investors make during a market downturn. I’ve observed these mistakes in my professional role as an advisor, but also as a human and an investor myself, so I hope these points will be useful for you. 

Warren Buffett about gold:

“For every dollar you could have made in American Business, you’d have less than a penny of gain by buying into a store of value which people tell you to run to every time you get scared by the headlines.”

Financial Misbehaviour

30 psychological biases that often prevent us from making logical financial decisions. 

Fitness & Finances - WIth Rob Caplan - First Wealth

Fitness and finances are closely connected. Focusing on both is a smart move. 

How (Not) To Position Your Investment Portfolio For 2018

TLDR: No one can predict the direction of the stock markets, if they tell you they can, at best they’re delusional, at worst out and out liars.

Top 10 Non-Financial Investments. John Ndege and I talked recently about non-financial investments and came up with a list of the top five things we’d recommend people invest in. Although Maven Adviser is mainly concerned with personal investments and finance, there’s way more to it than that. You can’t focus on money in isolation, without thinking about what else is important in life.

John Ndege joined me recently to chat about our top 10 films, documentaries or TV series about money and business. 

Nine years ago, Buffett issued a challenge to the hedge fund industry as a whole that nobody could put together a portfolio which could outperform a Standard and Poor’s 500 (the largest companies with stocks listed on NASDAQ or NYSE) over a ten-year period.

John Ndege joined me recently to chat about books and reading habits. Although we’re both prolific readers, John admitted spending $1,100 on books in 2016. His aim was to master what other people have experienced, so he could learn from their successes and failures and apply that to his own life

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 real value is created by frequently coming back to your plan (at least annually) and making the changes that become necessary as life plays out. The plan itself reflects just one period of time - the planning process trumps the actual plan.