Featured and Latest Posts
Does Gold Deserve a Place in Your Portfolio?
Gold has captivated human societies for millennia, from Roman coins to central bank vaults. Today, it’s often seen as a safe haven or inflation hedge—but how does it actually stack up as a long-term investment?
This post examines gold’s track record across nearly a century, comparing its returns, volatility, and portfolio role to equities, bonds, property, and cash. The evidence shows that whilst gold preserves purchasing power and shines in crises, it lacks the income and compounding power of productive assets. Still, with low correlation and strong performance during market stress, gold can play a valuable diversifying role—particularly when used strategically alongside stocks and bonds.
Factor Investing in Fixed Income
Factor investing is widely used in equities, but its application in fixed income remains overlooked. Yet decades of research show that bond returns are shaped by two persistent, compensated risks: term and credit. These represent the extra return for holding longer-term or lower-rated bonds, respectively.
Crucially, these premia can accrue even when yields fall. They are realised through mechanisms like roll-down, spread compression, and carry, not by betting on the direction of interest rates.
This post explores how fixed income factor investing works, how firms like Dimensional apply it in practice, and why traditional market cap-weighted bond indices often work against investors seeking higher expected returns.
What Does a Good Financial Decision Look Like?
Good financial decisions aren’t about predicting the future—they’re about following a sound process today.
In investing, outcomes are noisy. Short-term performance often reflects randomness, not skill. Yet fund managers continue to pitch five-year track records as if they prove anything. They don’t.
As Ken French puts it, a five-year chart ‘tells you nothing’. The real skill lies in filtering out the noise—evaluating strategy, incentives, costs, and behavioural fit.
Don’t chase what worked recently. Stick with what works reliably.
Home Bias in Asset Allocation: A Rational Case for (Some) UK Overexposure?
Home bias—the tendency to favour domestic assets—is one of the most persistent patterns in investor behaviour. For UK investors, that means holding more in UK equities, gilts, property and sterling assets than global market capitalisation would suggest. And whilst much of this is driven by familiarity or inertia, a blanket rejection of UK exposure may go too far.
This post examines the case for a modest UK overweight, exploring five rational reasons why some home bias may actually be optimal. From currency matching and tax efficiency to relative valuations and implementation simplicity, there are good reasons for UK investors to hold 15–25% of their equity allocation at home—deliberately, not by default.
Good financial decisions aren’t about predicting the future—they’re about following a sound process today.
In investing, outcomes are noisy. Short-term performance often reflects randomness, not skill. Yet fund managers continue to pitch five-year track records as if they prove anything. They don’t.
As Ken French puts it, a five-year chart ‘tells you nothing’. The real skill lies in filtering out the noise—evaluating strategy, incentives, costs, and behavioural fit.
Don’t chase what worked recently. Stick with what works reliably.