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Wealth can buy security, freedom and choice. What it cannot do is address the purpose of financial planning: telling you when to stop. New behavioural research commissioned by Y TREE finds that the most driven wealthy people report both the highest life satisfaction and the highest anxiety, a reminder that knowing what money is for may matter as much as growing it.

When a false claim is corrected, we assume its influence disappears. New experimental evidence suggests that is true for numbers but not for stories: a debunked statistic leaves almost no trace, while a debunked story keeps shaping beliefs — and leaves people more confident, not less. This is what the finding means for the market narratives investors absorb every day, and why the beliefs held most firmly may deserve the most scrutiny.

On 14 July 2026 the FCA proposed the biggest overhaul of UK asset management regulation since the rules were inherited from the EU: a single remuneration code, a new fund-reporting framework and higher size thresholds, worth an estimated £128 million a year to firms. The industry welcomed it within hours. What the reforms mean for ordinary investors, and whether the savings ever reach them, is the debate that has barely begun.

In January 2020, Terry Smith told his investors why Neil Woodford had failed: the star manager changed his game. Five years on, Smith's own Fundsmith letter records the highest turnover in the fund's history and a new taste for momentum — and the way he explains it matches a pattern behavioural researchers have measured in fund managers' own words.

Buying put options to insure a portfolio against a market crash feels like the prudent thing to do. But new research covering more than two centuries of market history finds that portfolio insurance loses money over time — and that it fails in exactly the slow, grinding bear markets that do investors the most harm. People insure almost everything they value. Homes, cars, phones, even pets: paying a modest premium to guard against a loss you would rather not face is one of the

Most investors assume prices are moved by information: earnings, interest rates, news. A peer-reviewed study of 37 years of Nasdaq data suggests something stranger. The poor returns of speculative 'lottery-like' stocks are concentrated after sunny weather in the cities where the firms are based — and largely vanish after cloudy spells. The finding says less about forecasts than about how quietly mood reaches our decisions, and why rules-based investing exists.

Terry Smith built Fundsmith on a simple discipline: buy good companies and do nothing. Now, five years into trailing the market, he is turning over half his portfolio and paying more attention to momentum. The strategy that made his name is changing. The fee that came with it is not.

Through 2026, retail investors in semi-liquid private credit funds tested their promised liquidity — and lost. New research reveals why the quarterly gates designed to prevent panic actually create it: because meeting redemptions imposes costs on those who stay, everyone has an incentive to run first.

Investors instinctively turn to past performance when choosing funds. But new Morningstar research on 6,003 European funds finds it is far more reliable as a warning sign than a buy signal.

A sharp sector rotation has swept the US stock market, and the instinct is that a clever forecaster could have called it and cashed in. But experiments by Elm Wealth — first with finance graduates handed tomorrow's headlines, then with leading AI models — suggest that even perfect foreknowledge rarely makes an investor money. The deciding factor turns out to be not foresight but how much you choose to stake.

The World Cup is a genuine, enormous attention shock — Wikipedia traffic spikes eightfold during the final. Yet a new working paper finds the World Cup stock market effect barely registers in the deep, global markets that carry most of the world's money, and shows how two ordinary ways of measuring it can conjure the effect out of nothing. Where the distraction does bite is among retail investors trading on the noise — the people the original studies never quite looked at.

Buying an ESG fund is widely assumed to change corporate behaviour. New research from Drexel University and the University of Texas at Dallas finds that most ESG funds have little measurable impact — but a committed minority, with a genuine financial incentive to engage, drives real improvements in the companies they hold. The difference lies not in what a fund owns but in how it behaves as an owner.

Two investors can study the same rising market and reach opposite conclusions about what comes next. A new MIT working paper spanning 68 years finds that only the contrarian, sophisticated forecast has ever reliably predicted returns, while the bullishness of ordinary investors — the instinct behind chasing returns — predicts little or points the wrong way. Here is what seven decades of evidence say that feeling is really worth.

A new working paper has documented the largest price inefficiency ever found in the stock market: a pure-news signal with a Sharpe ratio of 3.1, more than double any known factor. But the researchers used a frontier AI model, millions of news articles and institutional trading costs to find it — and the same evidence that shows markets are inefficient also shows why an ordinary investor still can't beat them.

The wealth management industry thinks it has a marketing problem with women. The evidence points to something costlier: women are charged more for the same products, are more exposed to the underperformance that erodes a portfolio over time, and live longer for that drag to compound. A look at what the research says about the financial advice women receive, and what advice built around the life it has to fund would do differently.

The United States now accounts for about 62 per cent of world stock market value. The last market this dominant was Britain in 1900, not America — and Britain's owners were rewarded through a century of decline, while Japan's were made to wait 34 years to break even. The difference was not size but the price paid at the peak. A look at what the long-run evidence says about US stock market dominance, and what it means for a globally diversified investor.

The managers running the biggest active funds picked stocks that beat the market in 2025 — and most still lagged their benchmark. A Morningstar do-nothing experiment and a body of academic research explain why active funds underperform even when the picking is good: skilled buying undone by poor selling, the hidden cost of trading, and the incentives that keep managers churning. The UK evidence points the same way.

AI now sits beside roughly a third of British retail investors as they make money decisions. New research from Wharton, MIT and a Nobel laureate puts a number on what it's doing to their judgment: confidence rises by nearly 12 percentage points, even when the AI is wrong half the time. The researchers call it cognitive surrender — and the investors most prone to it are the ones least likely to notice.

How often should you check your investment portfolio? Probably far less often than you do. The 56/44 daily split of up and down days in the stock market, combined with the human tendency to feel losses twice as keenly as gains, means daily checking is almost mathematically guaranteed to make you miserable. Ben Carlson's new book Risk & Reward sets out the evidence — and the practical moves that protect long-term investors from their own short-term instincts.

The second edition of the award-winning How to Fund the Life You Want is published today. Most personal finance books are designed to be read. This one was designed to be used. Robin Powell explains why the best investing book for UK readers in 2026 doesn't just explain investing – it asks the reader to do something about it, with a free workbook, six rules and a foreword from the Financial Times' Consumer Editor Claer Barrett.