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15 July 2022
In late 2021 Tesla peaked at a $1.23 trillion market cap; Bitcoin at $1.26 trillion. From a narrow view their subsequent drops "destroyed" hundreds of billions in wealth. I think that framing misses s…
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8 July 2022
Hurricane Camille hit in 1969 and narrowly missed New Orleans. When Katrina came in 2005, many who had lived through Camille didn't evacuate — and died. They'd learned the wrong lesson. I worry the qu…
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17 September 2021
When it comes to investing, I have a personal rule of thumb: if someone offers a high guaranteed return on an investment, I walk in the other direction. Bonds issued by Governments or reputable instit…
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4 June 2021
Every time I work with a client, I make a bald statement of fact. If you invest in growth-oriented investments, there WILL be times when the value of those investments drops. Sometimes significantly.…
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27 November 2020
The future is uncertain, but plenty within it isn't really. Community transmission of COVID, a market downturn, dying at some point — these are when-not-if events, not if-they-happen events. Much of g…
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2 October 2020
Involuntary retirement — losing a role and not returning to the workforce — can have a huge financial and emotional impact. Playing it "safe" by staying put in one role for decades can actually be ris…
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11 September 2020
When I give financial advice, one of the most important questions I ask is about job security. It's easy to think about this in terms of your current role. But there's a second, often more important f…
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7 May 2020
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…
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17 April 2020
For most of my clients I recommend widely-diversified, low-fee index funds. They're steady, sensible, and almost no one gets really rich from them. Investing in a business is one of the few things tha…
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31 March 2020
It's not fun being asset poor and cash poor. It's rarely fun to be asset rich and cash poor either. If you've got cash on hand right now, you're probably feeling better than most. But there are real r…
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7 February 2020
"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…
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16 August 2019
How would you invest if you were 60 with $5 million and spent $100,000 a year? Some of my clients in this position sit heavily in defensive assets. Others sit 80-90% in growth assets. Both are right —…
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19 July 2019
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…
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31 May 2019
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…
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18 January 2019
Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear is one of the few books that has stuck with me for years. It's about protecting yourself from violence, but more broadly it's about human nature — the social enginee…
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3 December 2018
"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…
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12 November 2018
Parents help their kids in obvious ways — education, deposits on homes. But there's a subtler one worth naming: underwriting risks. A parent in a sound financial position can take the place of a traum…
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27 August 2018
Simplicity is now cash flow positive, sooner than its founder expected. Even when it wasn't, I was sanguine about recommending it. The underlying assets are highly liquid, and the Public Trust holds t…
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30 July 2018
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…
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16 July 2018
People sometimes tell me they don't want to take any risks with their investments. I have to tell them all investments have risks — even "safe" ones like term deposits and cash under the mattress. For…
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29 October 2017
For most people, I recommend low-cost, index-based funds — don't try to beat the market, just make sure the market doesn't beat you. But the honest answer is that you *can* get better-than-market retu…
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2 October 2017
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…
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21 August 2017
If you've engaged a financial adviser, you'll be familiar with risk tolerance questionnaires — and robo-advisers lean on them even harder. Here's a dirty little secret: they're not nearly as valuable…
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17 August 2017
Retirement is often a euphemism for being displaced from the workforce — and involuntary unemployment is one of the few things with an enduring negative impact on life satisfaction. Career risk is rea…
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19 June 2017
Many insurance advisers provide terrific advice — but not always. Two red flags worth watching for: when the adviser has recommended the same level of life insurance cover for both you and your partne…
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5 May 2017
If you lose the ability to make decisions, your spouse or parents can't just step in — someone has to apply to the Court, which means months of delay and thousands of dollars. An EPA avoids all that.…
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13 April 2017
Plenty of people are under-insured. But plenty are also over-insured — paying expensive premiums for cover they no longer need. Reducing cover is trickier than it sounds, and most advisers have financ…
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27 March 2017
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…
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24 September 2016
We live in a fantastic time — safer, healthier, more prosperous than ever. And yet. Consider a dentist worth $2 million and a criminal worth $2 million: same number, very different risk profiles. As t…
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24 January 2016
Paul Graham, having sold a startup and become wealthy, started paying attention to how fortunes are actually lost. Not through excessive expenditure — it’s hard to blow a fortune on luxuries without n…
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10 October 2015
I'm a huge advocate of most forms of insurance — general insurance for the house, contents, and car; personal insurance for life, income, total and permanent disability, and trauma. It's a foundationa…
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9 September 2015
The things most likely to kill us aren't swashbuckling. Turbulence and close calls get the heart racing, but heart disease is the leading cause of death — and the risks driving it are sitting on the c…
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14 July 2015
Ask most educated people what the leading cause of death is in a developed country and they'll say heart disease. But a provocative Ralph Keeney paper reframes this: the real leading cause of death is…
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6 February 2015
Do ALL people need life, trauma, total and permanent disability, or income protection insurance? No. Do MOST people need insurance? Yes. These policies are typically about making sure the people who d…
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4 December 2014
David Myers' Intuition: Its Powers and Perils shaped how I think about probability. Big hearts and hard heads can come wrapped in the same skin — being wise means asking to see the numbers, even when…