Investing
Risk tolerance is not a personality test
How much risk you should take depends on your time horizon and your capacity to absorb loss. How much you feel comfortable with is…
Investing
Index funds, risk, fees and the long arithmetic of compounding.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Investing
Fees are the only part of an investment return you can predict
Nobody knows what markets will do. Everybody knows what a one per cent annual charge does over thirty years.
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Investing
Compound interest is not magic, but the time axis is
The famous curve is not about the rate. It is about how many years you leave it, and the last decade does most of the work.
Investing
What you actually own when you buy a share
A share is a legal claim on a residual, and almost every feature of stock market behaviour follows from what that claim is and is…
Investing
Bond prices move against interest rates, and the reason is arithmetic
The most confusing thing about bonds becomes obvious once you see that the payment is fixed and the price is not.
Investing
Diversification is about correlation, not about the number of holdings
Owning thirty things that all fall together is not diversified, and owning five that behave differently might be.
Investing
An index is a rule somebody wrote, not a fact about the market
Tracking an index feels neutral. Every index encodes decisions about what counts, how it is weighted and when it changes.
Investing
Drip-feeding money in is a decision about regret, not about returns
Investing a lump sum gradually usually costs you expected return. It buys something else, and that something else is sometimes…
Investing
Dividends are not extra money appearing from nowhere
When a company pays out, the share price adjusts for it. Whether you want dividends is a question about tax and cashflow, not about…
Investing
A fall of half needs a gain of double to get back
Percentage losses and percentage gains are not symmetrical, and the asymmetry gets worse the larger the fall.
Investing
Currency exposure is a decision you make by ignoring it
Investing outside your own currency adds a second variable, and most people acquire it without noticing they chose.
Investing
Rebalancing is a rule that makes you sell what went up
It is the least intuitive part of running a portfolio, and the discipline it imposes is the reason it works.