The gap between understanding what good long-term investing looks like and actually doing it is vast — and it’s bridged, if at all, by process, patience and self-awareness. These posts explore how to build an investment approach that survives contact with real markets: how to think about risk, time horizons, diversification and portfolio construction in ways that acknowledge human psychology rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.

 

Stick to What You Know
In times of uncertainty, investors gravitate toward their most human instincts — which are almost always at odds with sound long-term decision-making.

The Art of Doing Less
Most investors would achieve better outcomes by doing less — the challenge is that in investing, unlike almost every other domain, inaction is psychologically the hardest path.

What is the Illiquidity Premium?
The illiquidity premium is real but frequently overstated — and much of what investors call a premium is really just concealed risk or a reward for their own good behaviour.

What is Market Timing?
Market timing means different things to different people — an attempt to clarify what it actually is, and why most investors should be very cautious about claiming to do it.

What is the Behaviour Gap and How Can Investors Close it?
The behaviour gap — the difference between fund returns and the returns investors actually earn — is often the biggest cost in investing, and one of the least discussed.

Trouble on the Horizon
Even the soundest investment philosophy is undermined when the time horizon it relies on is inconsistent with how investors actually behave under pressure.

The Portfolio Problem
Uses a thought experiment to expose a fundamental conflict in how investors think about risk and protection in their portfolios.

What is Risk?
Risk is one of the most used and least understood words in investing — an attempt to cut through the metrics to what it actually means for real investors.

The Perils of Line-Item Thinking
Obsessing over individual positions while losing sight of long-term goals is a pervasive problem — one that good portfolio construction should be designed to resist.

Investing is Hard
A thought experiment using US equity market caps makes the case that even with a crystal ball, investing would be frustratingly difficult.

Investors Must Survive
Long-term investing requires not just making good decisions but surviving long enough to benefit from them — the ergodicity problem that too many ignore.

Let Compounding Do Its Work
Compounding is powerful enough to produce extraordinary long-run results — if investors can resist the temptation to interrupt it at the worst moments.

Investors Should Expect the Worst (In the Short Run)
Painful short-term periods are not aberrations to be avoided — they are the price of long-term equity returns, and investors should plan for them accordingly.

Diversification is Not a Free Lunch
Contrary to the famous claim, diversification isn’t free — it requires accepting underperformance in parts of your portfolio that can be behaviourally very difficult to sustain.

With the Best of Intentions
The return of bond yields to normal levels was welcomed by investors — but what it actually means for how bonds fit into a portfolio is more complicated than it appears.

What Would You Put in an Investment Time Capsule?
The principles that would survive twenty years — and the ones that would look embarrassingly dated — are a useful guide to what actually matters in investing.

Make Doing Nothing the Default
In a world designed to prompt reaction, deliberately raising the bar for action is one of the most powerful things an investor can do.

The Most Important Thing(s)
A school visit prompts a reflection on what investors should actually prioritise — and why the most important things are rarely the most discussed ones.

Why Can’t We Stop Changing Our Investment Process?
Process drift is one of the most damaging and least-discussed problems in investing — why we keep tinkering with things that are working, and how to stop.

What Next for Defensive and Cautious Investors After a Torrid 2022?
2022 was painful for cautious investors — an examination of what it means for portfolio construction and how to think about it behaviourally.

The Power of Not Having a View
The investment industry demands confident opinions on everything — but the willingness to say ‘I don’t know’ is often a sign of intellectual honesty, not weakness.

Something Has to Hurt
Any investment approach that genuinely has edge will involve periods of pain — and the willingness to accept that pain is inseparable from capturing the returns.

Bear Markets Are a Test of Investor Emotions
Bear markets don’t just test portfolios — they test decision-making processes, and most investors discover their process is weaker than they thought.

What We Should Remember About Bear Markets
The things worth bearing in mind during a sell-off — written when the emotions are manageable, to be read when they aren’t.

Which Books Should Investors Interested in Behaviour Read?
A recommended reading list for investors who want to understand the psychological side of markets — and the reasons why each book is worth the time.

What is the Point of Owning Bonds in a Rising Yield Environment?
When bonds are falling and equities are falling, the diversification case looks threadbare — here’s how to think about it without abandoning long-term principles.

What Are Your Investment Beliefs?
Process over outcomes is the mantra — but what does it mean to actually define a set of investment beliefs, and why is it so difficult to stick to them?

Should Passive Investors Be Happy Buying Equities at 100x Earnings?
Passive investing removes the stock-picking problem but not the valuation problem — and the Japanese equity market is a sobering reminder of why that matters.

The Dog and the Frisbee – Why Investors Should Consider a Simple Approach to Complex Markets
In a complex, uncertain environment, simple rules often outperform elaborate models — and investing is no exception.

Betting Against Warren Buffett
A thought experiment about stock selection that illuminates the difficulty of consistently identifying concentrated opportunities — even with the world’s best investor.

Long-Term Investors Must Make a Ulysses Pact
Pre-commitment devices — like tying yourself to the mast — are one of the most effective tools for protecting long-term investors from their short-term selves.

What Happens if the 60/40 Portfolio Underperforms for a Decade?
The 60/40 portfolio has been remarkably successful — but what are the behavioural implications of a prolonged period when it doesn’t work?

The Three Elements of an Investment Time Horizon
Time horizon isn’t a single thing — it has three distinct components, and confusing them leads to portfolios that are misaligned with what investors actually need.

Good Investors Make Decisions They Hope Will Cost Money
The best investment decisions — buying insurance, holding diversifying assets, maintaining process during drawdowns — often look wrong in the short run.

A Little Bit of Friction Can Make Us Better Long-Term Investors
Making it harder to react impulsively is one of the most effective nudges available — the right amount of friction can save investors from their worst instincts.

A Fund Manager’s Time Horizon is the Shortest Common Denominator
The ideal of long-term investing is constantly undermined by the short-term incentives that govern how fund managers are assessed and rewarded.

Investment Risk is About the Extreme and the Unseen
The risks that cause the most damage are not the ones we spend the most time measuring — they’re the tail risks we’d rather not think about.

We Need To Talk About Ergodicity
Why the average outcome and the typical outcome are very different things — and why ignoring that distinction can be genuinely dangerous for long-term investors.

Are You Sticking to Your Investment Principles or Suffering from Escalating Commitment?
The line between principled conviction and sunk cost fallacy is one of the most difficult to draw in investing — and the consequences of getting it wrong are severe.

Stale Pricing Does Not Equal Low Risk or Low Correlation
Infrequently-priced assets look calm and diversifying — but smoothed valuations are not the same as stable ones, and confusing the two creates hidden risk.

Your Investment Time Horizon Might Be Shorter Than You Think
Most investors think they’re long-term but behave short-term — and often the constraints on their horizon are ones they haven’t properly examined.

Most Investors Should Be Satisficers not Maximisers
The pursuit of the optimal portfolio is self-defeating — a good-enough approach that you can actually stick to will almost always beat the theoretically perfect one.

50 Reasons Why We Don’t Invest for the Long-Term
A comprehensive list of the forces — psychological, structural, commercial — that conspire to make long-term investing harder than it should be.

Is There A Behavioural Premium for Illiquid Investments?
Being locked into an investment removes the ability to make bad decisions — and that constraint may be worth more to some investors than any market premium.

Few Things Destroy Long-Term Investment Returns Like Short-Term Measurement
How we measure performance shapes the decisions we make — and measuring long-term strategies over short periods is one of the most reliable ways to sabotage them.

The Death of Diversification
During periods of strong equity performance, diversification looks unnecessary and costly — which is precisely when forgetting its purpose is most dangerous.

Is Volatility Risk?
A genuine disagreement with many respected investors — why volatility is not the same as risk, and why conflating them leads to poor portfolio decisions.

Investment Risk is a Behavioural Phenomenon Not Just a Number
Risk isn’t just about probability distributions — it’s about how uncertainty makes us feel and how those feelings distort the decisions we make.