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5 May 2023
AI can get you 90% or 95% of the way through a project surprisingly quickly. Getting the final stretch — the bit that makes it actually ready — is often harder than everything that came before. It's a…
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4 April 2023
Red herrings are things that distract us from what is really important — a bit like bringing up the upcoming movie Superman vs Voldemort during a conversation that is hitting a lull. When it comes to…
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2 April 2023
I've always said my crystal ball broke sometime in my late teens or early twenties. But right now, that feels more true than usual. The emergence of AI has me genuinely uncertain about what comes next…
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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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12 March 2021
The idea that there's one specific right way to invest, or manage your financial affairs, is kind of weird. Yes, I give clients specific recommendations — but that's what I'd do in their shoes. In rea…
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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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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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27 March 2020
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…
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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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29 November 2019
When it comes to the things that really matter, focus on what you can control. Checking your KiwiSaver balance every week isn't one of them — and yes, I'm a hypocrite about this when it comes to Trump…
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19 September 2019
A feature of knockout tournaments like the Rugby World Cup is that the "best" team often doesn't win. If one side is genuinely good enough to beat another 55% of the time, the weaker team still takes…
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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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12 July 2019
I have clients worth tens of thousands of dollars, and clients worth tens of millions of dollars. I find it much easier to advise clients with millions rather than thousands. As a general rule, the we…
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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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22 February 2019
Warren Buffett is endlessly quoted about investing, but his most important lesson isn't about money. In a 2001 speech at the University of Georgia he said you measure success in life by how many of th…
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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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3 September 2018
A friend's cancer diagnosis sent me back to Stephen Jay Gould's essay on being told his own disease had a median survival of eight months. Most people would read that as "I'll be dead in eight months"…
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6 August 2018
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…
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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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11 April 2018
How do people respond when the unthinkable happens? How should we respond? Amanda Ripley's terrific book The Unthinkable looks at extreme circumstances and how people actually act — with guidance for…
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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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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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1 May 2017
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…
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9 April 2017
Next time you're facing a decision with uncertain outcomes, imagine 100 versions of yourself splitting into parallel universes. Which decision leads to good outcomes across the widest slice of them?
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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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20 February 2016
One of the best forms of good luck is the absence of bad luck. I've been lucky in that sense — no major health issues, no tragedies. The defensive side of managing luck is every bit as important as co…
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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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16 December 2014
The world we live in was not inevitable. But it can feel like it is. One of the ways I like to draw attention to this is by looking at movies that could have been cast very differently — Cary Grant as…