Education

To adapt the words from Sergeant Pepper – ‘it was 46 years ago today’ – that your then naive but optimistic scribe started work for the Halifax Building Society. Over the subsequent nearly half a century in what might loosely be called a career I progessed from cashier clerk/managment trainee through quite a few iterations of finance industry jobs to end up as your semi-retired keyboard warrior writing a blog on the internet on a warm sunny day in Lithuania, a country I suspect all of us know more about than we did in 1976!

Don’t panic – I am not going to write thousands of words about nostalgic but to you boring biographical stuff. I would only say that I have made mistakes, learned a lot and had a few successes, and that all applies to my adventures as an investor myself!

I refer to this quite large block of time so as to remind readers that when getting all stressed about your investment portfolio performance, if you ever do, you need to remember that most of us are now invested for life and hopefully that means we are going to be in the market for at least a decade or more.

That being the case, we need to always remember that markets are cyclical and we should not get overly focused on the short term. I can now say that with absolute confidence after all that water under the bridge!