Persistently skilled fund managers are a very rare commodity, hard to identify in advance and hard to live with over time. Anecdotes and examples of great managers are often used to justify active management, yet even some of the truly ‘great’ managers have failed to live up to their billing. Like the laws of physics, where many big stars eventually reach their evolutionary end in a supernova, the rules of efficient markets, the zero-sum game where losers must fund winners, investment costs and poor investor behaviour have a similar impact on those labelled as ‘star’ managers. Here are some examples of fading stars.

Systematic, evidence-based investing often results in very little activity in a portfolio. It is wrong to think that this is the result of a ‘set-and-forget’ strategy.

2018 may have been a disappointing year for equities, but is shouldn’t have been a surprise. December 2018 dished up a rather distasteful present for the holiday period. Many lines were written in the broadsheets about the global equity market falls, but were they really anything out of the ordinary?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the world in general, and the UK specifically, is in a right old state. There’s certainly lots to be thinking about – Trump’s belligerence, China’s debt mountain, Putin’s malevolence, not forgetting Brexit and the prospect of a far-left leaning Labour Government. This inevitably leads to understandable concern for what this all means for investment portfolios. This note seeks to reassure you that well-structured portfolios are capable of riding out any storm.

It is an inevitable part of investing that at some point markets will fall by an alarming - if not unexpected - degree. We haven’t seen large market falls for a decade. We should expect that we will. When, and in what magnitude, no-one knows.

Modern life provides us - some would say swamps us - with so much news, information and punditry, which focuses on the here-and-now, that it is easy to be overwhelmed with the feeling of doom and gloom.