All Insights by Date
23 September 2021, Mark Page
3 September 2021, Mark Page
Nobody wants their portfolio to be tossed around like an autumn leaf, driven by forces
they don’t understand, with destination goodness knows where. This series will focus on
the new ideas which helped us navigate some of the biggest market moves over the past
10-years.
9 July 2021, Mark Page
Half the world is predicting that US Treasury bond yields will rise sharply. A bystander
might feel foolish for not seeing this. With bond yields falling sharply, it is no longer clear
who the fools really are.
12 January 2021, Mark Page
30 October 2020, Mark Page
18 September 2020, Mark Page
10 January 2020, Andrea Badelt
Financial regulators repeatedly warn of unfair practices in the retail investment space:
high fees, price clustering, poor advice, low transparency, and what not. But nothing
compares to real-life examples.
14 September 2021, Mark Page
This note reveals how standard UK investment fees can gobble up almost half your money
every 20 years, and two thirds of your pension over an average working life. A hedge fund
would not stand for this. Why should you?
Industry standard fees alone will typically erode 43% of portfolio value every 20-years*.
Add poor performance into the equation and a saver’s long-term financial wellbeing can
be severely damaged.
21 July 2021, Andrea Badelt
23 June 2021, Andrea Badelt
We are delighted to share with you real-life examples of the parasitic creations we find
sneaking around in the financial gloom, where they slowly eat your hard-earned savings
and future happiness.
19 October 2021, Mark Page
28 October 2021, Mark Page
Until we change incentives long the entire ‘investment-production-consumption’
chain, we cannot expect to deliver anything close to the impact needed to combat
climate change and other social problems
Photos by Ken Cheung, Anne Nygård, Marc Sendra Martorell, Rvoji Iwata , Kristina Four, Mark König, snowscat, krisna iv, Johannes Plenio, Sarah Kilian, Dimitry Grigoriev, Katie Moum; all on Unsplash
With current high valuations, care should be exercised when listening to those
rocking up late to the equity party, just as the band is packing up to go home.
Buying an active fund is worse than paying someone to play Roulette with your life
savings. The data is clear: It tells a story of saver wealth destruction.
18 November 2021, Mark Page
11 January 2022, Mark Page
Can ESG investors help heal the world’s social and climate ills?
Can they even identify companies moving towards a distant and desirable
equilibrium? And do you trust them?
16 April 2022, Mark Page
Everyone is entitled to their own belief system and, for many, weapon makers have
morphed from borderline pariah into a key public good. Leaving the ESG-industry
has some serious questions to answer over its shady role in Ukraine.
24 December 2020, Matthew Machin
This Christmas edition of our financial psychology series uses the science of honeybee
behaviour as a framework to explain why trust in the financial services industry is at an
all-time low.
First in this series, we explore the possibilities afforded by two-level theories to resharpen
conventional econometric and stock valuation models which have been bent and blunted by
post-2008 zero interest rate dynamics.
14 December 2020, Matthew Machin
28 January 2021, Matthew Machin
The new Robinhood retail stock jockeys see anything they want to see. In fact, all
of us are blindsided by beliefs, including hedge fund managers. What is to be
done?
Investors are increasingly nervous of rising asset prices but not entirely sure why,
other than a vague sense of dread and an uncanny feeling of déjà vu.
We investigate….
15 January 2021, Matthew Machin
Focus on what is actually driving markets, not what should drive them in a utopian
world. And remember, every bubble contains the seeds of truth and of future
opportunities.
12 February 2021, Matthew Machin
9 April 2021, Matthew Machin
Experts are mostly abominable financial forecasters, bad at short-term forecasting,
bad at long-term forecasting, bad at forecasting stock prices. Yet investors continue
to rely on the experts, even when their track records suggest otherwise.
19 July 2022, Mark Page
Investors are seeing 10-20% losses across their portfolios as stocks have fallen
while bond markets are suffering close to their worst year on record. Are the “buy
and hold” stars aligned for renewed success?
3 August 2022, Mark Page
Financial ‘experts’ prefer to explain how things ‘should be’, rather than questioning
the way they are. “Stick with it and prices will recover”, is the oft repeated response.
But will they?
11 August 2022, Mark Page
What age do you plan to retire?
Bouncy markets are nobody’s fault, but they happen’ and the risk must be factored
in. False accuracy is dangerous. It can ruin people’s lives.
23 August 2022, Mark Page
We find it implausible that central banks who approached 2022 at what in monetary
terms was the speed of heat, would not have known the basic things they needed
to do, to avoid a violent collision with inflation.
21 November 2022, Mark Page
The way the Truss Government fell should concern all who care about democracy.
We’re not denying that Liz Truss and her erstwhile Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng made
serious mistakes, they did, but they nevertheless had a mandate of sorts for their
manifesto.
13 January 2023, Mark Page
2022 proved to be a challenging year. Against this backdrop, Eriswell is delighted to have
generated positive returns. But the most important lesson from 2022 – by far – was that
predicting the future is extremely hard. This does not mean that good forecasts about the
future are impossible.
20 March 2023, Mark Page
Financial markets find themselves in the midst of yet another violent patch that both regulators
and mainstream investors failed to foresee. Those of you who have followed our latest research
will know that the fabric of our modern economies and markets is woven from many semi-stable
equilibria. You will also know that the switch from one semi-stable equilibrium to another tends
to be violent and dangerous.
7 Janaury 2024, Mark Page
Modern meritocracies are curious. Ostensibly fair they leave many people with feelings of what
one might term ‘status or ‘consumption’ anxiety. This is despite people in material terms—housing,
health, food, working conditions—being better off today than at any point in history. Moreover,
whether someone suffers from such feelings of anxiety is largely a random affair.
