The investment industry is shaped by incentives that don’t always align with investors’ interests — and understanding those incentives is one of the most useful things any investor can do. These posts examine the structures, culture and behaviours of asset management: how teams make decisions, where ESG sits in the broader picture, why diversity matters, and what the industry looks like when you strip away the marketing.

 

Investment Teams Need Accountability, Trust and Common Goals
What makes investment teams work — and what gets in the way — through the lens of a Super Bowl-winning coach who knew something about collective performance.

How Might AI Disruption Change Investor Behaviour?
AI is creating a new kind of investment uncertainty — one where the fear isn’t a recession but the possible obsolescence of entire business models.

How Can Investors ‘Follow the Evidence’?
Following the evidence sounds simple — but in practice it requires navigating contradictory data, motivated reasoning and the limits of what evidence can actually tell us.

AI Hype Will Encourage Investors to do Precisely the Wrong Thing
AI as an investment theme has all the ingredients for behavioural disaster — transformational narrative, dramatic performance, and impossible-to-calibrate uncertainty.

Do Groups Make Good Decisions?
Buffett’s scepticism about committee-based investment management prompts a broader examination of when groups improve decisions and when they make them worse.

What’s The Big Idea?
Investment themes come and go — and the pattern of how they rise and fall tells us far more about investor behaviour than about the underlying opportunities.

ESG Investing is About Values, Value and Valuation
ESG investing involves three genuinely distinct questions that are too often conflated — separating them is essential for thinking clearly about what you’re actually doing.

How To Identify Behavioural Investment Opportunities and Risks
Our behavioural weaknesses create both risks — for our own portfolios — and opportunities, where the same weaknesses in others create mispricing.

Should Fund Investors Pay Lower Fees for Making Long-Term Commitments?
A proposal for aligning fund fee structures with the long-term behaviour that both investors and managers claim to want but that the current model actively discourages.

How (Not) to Talk About the Benefits of ESG Investing
The noble aims of ESG investing are routinely undermined by the way they’re marketed — here’s why the framing matters as much as the substance.

Should Investors Care about an Asset Manager’s Culture and Brand?
Culture is easy to dismiss as marketing — but the internal environment of an investment firm shapes decisions in ways that genuinely matter for long-term performance.

Investors Should Prefer Camels to Horses
The ‘camel as committee design’ adage misses something — in investing, the camel’s ungainly combination of qualities is often exactly what’s needed.

What is Your Investment Edge?
Edge is a simple concept with a complicated reality — most investors claim to have it, very few can specify what it actually is or where it comes from.

What is More Difficult, Asset Allocation or Security Selection?
A genuine debate about where the greater challenge lies — and what the answer implies about how investment teams should allocate their time and resource.

Why Should Equities Be Fairly Valued?
The assumption of fair valuation underpins a lot of investment theory — but the reasons why markets might systematically misprice assets are more compelling than they’re given credit for.

Does Sustainable Investing Change What Shareholders Want?
The shift toward sustainable investing is fundamentally about what corporations owe to society — a question with no easy answers but important implications.

10 (More) Questions ESG Investors Must Consider
A sequel to the original ESG questions post — as sustainable investing grew rapidly, so did the list of issues that deserved more honest scrutiny.

10 Questions ESG Investors Must Consider
Written when ESG was still riding high — a set of uncomfortable questions that weren’t being asked loudly enough at the time.

Why Are So Many Fund Managers Men?
The dramatic gender imbalance in fund management isn’t explained by ability — it’s explained by the same biases that distort investment decisions more broadly.

Ten Behavioural Advantages Amateur Investors Hold Over Professionals
Professional investors aren’t just plagued by the same biases as everyone else — they have additional ones, and amateurs have structural advantages they rarely exploit.

Is There a Behavioural Explanation for the Quality Factor in Equities?
The quality premium is a puzzle — investors should overpay for safety, not underpay for it — and the behavioural explanation turns out to be both compelling and counterintuitive.

What Can Investors Do About Overconfidence?
Overconfidence is one of the most pervasive and damaging biases in investment — and it’s particularly hard to address because it’s self-concealing by design.

Investors Should Assume That They Are No Better Than Average
The starting assumption for any investor should be that they have no edge — a position that is both statistically correct and almost universally ignored.

Don’t Avoid the Simple Questions
Fund research conversations are often derailed by complexity — but the most revealing questions are almost always the simplest ones, and we’re often reluctant to ask them.

Momentum Investing is Easy – So Why Does it Work?
Momentum is one of the best-evidenced phenomena in finance — and the fact that it’s so simple to implement yet so hard for investors to stick to explains why it persists.

The Asset Management Industry Must Confront Biases to Address its Diversity Problem
The lack of diversity in asset management is both a moral failure and an investment problem — and it won’t improve without confronting the biases that sustain it.