Markets are hard to predict. Not just difficult — structurally, deeply hard in ways that most market commentary ignores. These posts explore why forecasting fails so consistently, how uncertainty actually works, why geopolitical events rarely play out the way investors expect, and why the confident voices that dominate financial media should be treated with considerable scepticism.

 

Has the World Really Become More Uncertain for Investors?
Everyone says uncertainty is rising — but is the world actually more unpredictable, or are we just paying more attention to the noise?

Why Is It So Hard to Predict Financial Markets?
Markets aren’t just difficult to forecast — they’re designed to be, in ways that make confident predictions almost structurally doomed.

Financial Market Commentators Need the Skills of a Psychic
The expectations placed on market commentators are impossible to meet — so they’ve developed remarkably effective strategies for appearing to meet them anyway.

Does Increasing Geopolitical Risk Lead to Higher Equity Market Returns?
The relationship between geopolitical tension and market performance is far less intuitive than most commentary would have you believe.

How Does AI Think Markets Will Perform in 2026?
Asking AI models to forecast financial markets — an experiment that reveals as much about the limits of forecasting as it does about the limits of AI.

What Does ‘The Traitors’ Teach Us About How We Invest? Part II
A second visit to the TV game show that keeps delivering behavioural finance lessons about group dynamics, information and the illusion of control.

How Good Were Your 2025 Financial Market Forecasts?
A review of finance professionals’ 2025 predictions — and another instalment in the long-running story of how poorly even experts forecast markets.

Every Asset Manager’s 2026 Forecasts
You don’t need to read them all — here’s what they will say, updated for the current environment but fundamentally unchanged from every year before.

If There Was a Bubble, What Would You Do About It?
The more interesting question isn’t whether there’s a bubble — it’s whether knowing about it would actually change anything about your behaviour.

Trying to Time the Market is Like Playing ‘The Traitors’
Both activities involve reading ambiguous signals, making confident judgements with limited information, and losing money more often than not.

Gold is the Ultimate Belief Asset
Gold has no cashflows, no earnings, no intrinsic growth engine — its value depends entirely on what other people believe about it, which makes it fascinating and dangerous.

Invest Like You Are Bad at Making Predictions
Not as a counsel of despair, but as a practical starting point: if we accepted our forecasting limitations, how would we invest differently?

Thinking the Unthinkable (About US Assets)
When a narrative becomes so dominant that questioning it feels almost unreasonable, that’s usually a good sign that it’s worth questioning.

Bear Markets and Bad Decisions
Falling markets don’t just create financial losses — they create the conditions for the behavioural mistakes that compound those losses into something much worse.

A Guide to Navigating Tariff Turmoil
At times of acute market stress, the principles of good investing don’t change — they just become exponentially harder to apply.

The Two Most Dangerous Words in Investing
‘Democratisation’ and ‘innovation’ — two words that reliably signal products designed primarily to benefit sellers rather than buyers.

Improving Earnings Do Not Mean a Rising Stock Price is ‘Justified’
A common piece of market commentary that sounds reasonable but misunderstands the relationship between earnings growth and valuation.

If Equity Markets Didn’t Fall as Much Their Returns Would be Lower
The drawdowns that feel so catastrophic are not a flaw in equity investing — they’re the mechanism by which the long-run returns are generated.

Trump Trades and European Equity Exceptionalism
Four months after confident predictions of US dominance under Trump, markets had done almost exactly the opposite — a useful reminder about macro forecasting.

Dealing with Uncertainty
Uncertainty makes us want to forecast more, not less — which is exactly the wrong response, and one of the most consistent patterns in investor behaviour.

When the Incentives Change, I Change My Mind
The behaviour of tech billionaires under Trump illustrates that what looks like ideology is often just a rational response to shifting personal incentives.

Right Here, Right Now
A tour through every major financial market worry since 2018 — a list that should make us considerably humbler about the concerns dominating our attention today.

What Do Investors Expect in 2025?
Survey results from 276 finance professionals — a window into consensus expectations and why they should be treated with appropriate scepticism.

The Trouble with US Equity Exceptionalism
The US has outperformed for so long that explaining it has become a growth industry — but rationalising past returns is not the same as forecasting future ones.

Every Asset Manager’s 2025 Forecasts
The original version of the annual tradition — a pre-emptive guide to what the outlook pieces will say before you’ve had to read any of them.

Which Asset has the Best Bubble Potential?
Not a prediction, but a framework — what combination of ingredients makes an asset most likely to attract bubble-forming behaviour from investors?

Don’t Worry About What the Market is Telling You
Markets don’t ‘tell’ us things in any reliable sense — but the idea that they do gives us permission to make confident, often disastrous, decisions.

More Wrong than Right
Election week is a perfect environment for unjustifiably confident market forecasting — a phenomenon that says more about human psychology than about electoral outcomes.

Events, Dear Boy, Events
Major political events matter to investors — just not in the ways, or on the timescales, that most commentary suggests.

I Can’t Explain
Nobody could explain what caused the August 2024 market sell-off with any confidence — and the explanations that were offered tell us something important about how we construct narratives.

An Investor Checklist for Dealing with Geopolitical Risk
A practical set of questions to ask yourself when geopolitical events are dominating the headlines and your decision-making.

Everything is Obvious
In hindsight, market outcomes always look inevitable — which tells us nothing useful about the future but creates a powerful illusion of understanding.

Forecasting is Hard and We Are Not Very Good At It. What Should Investors Do?
Reviews the academic evidence on forecasting accuracy and draws practical conclusions about what to do when the evidence is this depressing.

Election Years are Dangerous for Investors (Just Not for the Reasons We Think)
The real risk in election years isn’t the outcome — it’s the explosion of confident forecasting that gives us permission to make emotionally-driven decisions.

My Top Stock and Fund Picks for 2024
I don’t have any — but the fact that you clicked tells us something interesting about the irresistible pull of investment recommendations.

What Does the Fourth Quarter of 2023 Tell Us About Investor Behaviour?
A strong end to the year raises predictable behavioural questions about how investors respond to positive surprises and rising valuations.

How Will Equity Markets Perform in 2024?
An annual tradition of asking a question nobody can answer reliably — and examining what it tells us that we keep asking it.

The Paradox of Past Performance
We know past performance is no guide to the future, and yet it influences almost every investment decision we make — an exploration of why.

Does The Wisdom of Crowds Mean Equity Markets Are Efficient?
The wisdom of crowds is a real phenomenon — but markets frequently violate the conditions required for it to work, which explains rather a lot.

What Does the Demise of SVB Tell Us About Our Behaviour During Market Shocks?
Uses the SVB collapse as a lens to examine how we behave during sudden, dramatic market events — and why the behaviour is so predictable.

Is it Easier for Investors to Forecast the Long-Term or Short-Term?
The counterintuitive answer is that long-term forecasts are easier — not because the future is predictable, but because the noise diminishes over time.

How Will Investors Behave in 2023?
Making predictions about investor behaviour is considerably more reliable than making predictions about markets — because the patterns are so consistent.

Investment Bubbles and Frauds Have a Lot in Common
Both exploit the same psychological vulnerabilities — compelling narratives, social proof, and our tendency to suspend disbelief when the story is good enough.

The Behavioural Lessons of Gilt Market Turmoil
The 2022 gilt crisis was a technical event with deeply human causes — here’s what it revealed about how stress distorts investment decision-making.

Why Can’t We Stop Making Short-Term Market Forecasts?
We know short-term forecasting is unreliable, we know forecasters are consistently wrong, and yet we cannot stop making and consuming predictions.

Most Investors Should Ignore the Risk of Major Macro Events
The Russian army massing on Ukraine’s border felt like something investors needed to act on — it wasn’t, and understanding why matters enormously.

The Inflation Story
Before inflation arrived, the narrative dominated market commentary — an early examination of how stories about macro events drive investor behaviour.

Behavioural Lessons from 2020
A year that provided more behavioural finance case studies than most careers — what did the pandemic market cycle teach us about investor psychology?

Financial Markets Are No More Uncertain Today Than They Were Last Year
The feeling that uncertainty has increased is almost always a reflection of our attention, not the actual level of uncertainty in the world.

What Lessons Should Investors Learn from the Coronavirus Bear Market? (Part One)
Written during the pandemic sell-off — a real-time examination of the behavioural forces at work when fear is at its most acute.

Why Are We More Worried About Coronavirus than Climate Change?
Explores the availability and salience biases that make some risks feel overwhelming and others feel abstract — regardless of their actual magnitude.

Investors Should Not Be Making Forecasts About Coronavirus
Written at the very start of the pandemic — a reminder that the appropriate response to genuine uncertainty is humility, not confident prediction.

Five Behavioural Resolutions for Investors in 2020
The usual resolution — to be a better long-term investor — requires more specificity than that to actually change anything.

What Will Investors Be Saying in Ten Years’ Time?
We are bad at forecasting but brilliant at hindsight — imagining the future through the lens of inevitable-sounding retrospectives.

When Will You Participate In An Asset Price Bubble?
Not if — when. Bubbles require belief, and belief is contagious. Understanding the mechanism is the first step to resisting it.