When markets start to fall, many investors feel the urge to act rashly. As Oxford Risk's GREG DAVIES says in this video though, the best move is usually to stay put. Here's why investors should tune out the short term noise, and see the bigger picture.
TRANSCRIPT
Robin Powell: “The investor’s chief problem — even his worst enemy — is likely to be himself." Those are the words of the famous financial academic and author Benjamin Graham, and they’re especially true in market crashes and corrections. Nobody likes to see the value of our investments fall sharply.
Greg Davies: Of course that’s stressful. It’s stressful because this is your hard-earned wealth. You had money, you lost money – in behavioural science, a well-studied feature of our human decision making is loss aversion. Basically put, as humans, we dislike red things. We’d much rather see a nice black number – things going up – than things going down; and that is emotionally stressful.
RP: The thing to remember in periods of market volatility is that the short term ups and downs are totally irrelevant to what you’re trying to achieve in the long term. Almost invariably, you should resist the urge to act.
GD: As humans, if we see something happening that we know affects our lives, or our wealth, or our money; it is perfectly natural to want to do something. The right answer for most investors is, in fact, entirely the opposite: it’s benign neglect. Retail investors have one huge advantage over professional investors: they don’t have to post their results at the end of the month or at the end of the year. The value of their portfolio at a specific date does not matter, unless they need to withdraw that money. The huge advantage you have is time. Time is your friend. You get to wait out the ups and downs of the market; wait for it to go back up. If you see your portfolio going down, it is irrelevant to what you’re trying to achieve in the long term; and the best thing you should do is simply leave it alone. Come back and look at it in six months or a year’s time, and probably the problem will have gone away.
RP: Leaving your portfolio alone is simple enough advice. But it can be hard to do in practice. Greg Davies has three tips for those situations, and the first is to stop paying attention to the financial news.
GD: Try and take a step back from the information, from the news, from the markets, from your portfolio. That gives you emotional distance, and that’s really, really valuable. The other thing that I think is absolutely vital in good decision making is – whenever you are tempted to make a decision for immediate, emotionally driven reasons; the best thing you can do is just pause. Build into every decision process, a pause point – and that could be as simple as, “I’m just going to go for a walk around the block.” The third thing I would say is: try and think about the big picture. Most of our inclinations to act in the moment are because we’re placing too much weight on the short term and not enough weight on our long term objectives. So step back and think: bigger picture. Or, they’re because we’re placing too much weight on that one investment we’re looking at, and not thinking, “Well actually, maybe that is only 2% of my total wealth.”
RP: So, tune out the noise; take a conscious pause; and see the bigger picture. And don’t make any big decisions without seeking professional advice.
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