prediction

1. 7 May 2020

   April 2020 was the S&P 500’s best month in over 30 years. Huh?! How is that possible?

   April 2020 was the S&P 500's best month in over 30 years — the same month tens of millions of Americans claimed unemployment. How? The sharemarket isn't the economy, and more importantly it's a predic…

2. 27 March 2020

   Could I have picked this market crash?

   COVID-19 had me questioning a lot of things, including my long-standing devotion to index-based investing. In retrospect it felt like I could have picked the crash — so could I have? Probably not. The…

3. 7 February 2020

   Pay less attention to historical returns

   "Past performance is no indication of future performance." If you've looked at any investment product with proper disclosure, you'd be familiar with this refrain. It's a statement that's required by l…

4. 19 July 2019

   My (in)efficient market hypothesis

   I don't think markets are efficient. Markets move up and down for all sorts of unpredictable, weird reasons. But they're inefficient in ways we can't predict — and valuing a share means betting on a f…

5. 14 June 2019

   Stop complicating your financial affairs!

   Kiwi personal finance forums are full of smart people endlessly debating which fund or platform is "best". I get frustrated with those debates, because they're operating in shades of good. Get your as…

6. 31 May 2019

   You’ll never have the “right” amount of insurance (but don’t let that stop you)

   You'll never have the "right" amount of insurance, because you're dealing with uncertainty. You can only tell what you needed with hindsight or a crystal ball. For most people the best case is paying…

7. 3 December 2018

   “Past performance is no guarantee of future performance” – especially when it comes to property

   "Past performance is no guarantee of future performance" isn't just compliance-speak. It's especially true for property. A client recently asked whether there's long-run data for NZ residential proper…

8. 6 August 2018

   The folly of predicting market downturns

   I'll start with a prediction. At some point in the future, the sharemarket will go down. It might go down in a big way. That's as accurate a prediction as anyone can make — timing and scale are out of…

9. 30 July 2018

   NZ Super and uncertainty in retirement planning

   The future is uncertain — but we still need to plan for retirement. Plenty of variables are unknowable: when you'll retire, how long you'll live, what returns you'll get. The one I want to focus on is…

10. 2 October 2017

    “What investment return can I expect?”

    People often ask me what investment return they can expect. I wish I could give them a number. I can't. Nor can anyone else — historical outcomes for the exact same portfolio vary wildly depending on…

11. 1 May 2017

    Long-term retirement planning and the uncertain future (speculative)

    Retirement planning is shot through with uncertainty — your costs, your health, whether NZ Super will exist as we know it, what your investments return. Zoom out further and radical technologies, from…

12. 27 March 2017

    If you fancy yourself as a stock picker, think about this.

    If you pick stocks, you aren't playing in a Little League. You're playing against the best full-time professionals in the world — the equivalent of stepping onto a tennis court with Federer, or a rugb…