Fear and FOMO: How to go against the crowd by understanding investing psychology

In episode 27 of Stocks Neat Co-Portfolio Manager Gareth Brown and CIO Steve Johnson discuss the recent performance of small caps and the psychology of investing. 

Understanding the psychology of ourselves and others can go a long way to helping us navigate through life. Markets and investing is no different. Understanding this can enable us to avoid biases and regulate emotions to make rational and effective investment decisions. 

In the episode, Gareth and Steve discuss the works of Kahneman and Tversky, and how their own personal experiences of investing have been changed and shaped over time. Listen to the full episode to find out why.

“You could make money out of the stock market without ever looking at a balance sheet or PnL if you really understand investing psychology when people are behaving irrationally”

Transcript

EPISODE 27

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] ANNOUNCER: Just a quick reminder, this podcast may contain general advice, but it doesn't take into account your personal circumstances, needs, or objectives. The scenarios and stocks mentioned in this podcast are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any financial products. Read the relevant PDFs. Assess whether that information is appropriate for you. And consider speaking to a financial advisor before making investment decisions. Past performance is no indicator of future performance.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:39] SJ: Hello, and welcome to Episode 27 of Stocks Neat. I'm Steve Johnson, Founder and Chief Investment Officer here at Forager. My most popular guests on the show. Gareth Brown joins us today for the first time in 2024. How's things go?

[0:00:57] GB: Hi, Steve. Hi, everyone. I think it's a good day. We had a great Christmas and the kids are back in school and back to work. So, everything's nice.

[0:01:03] SJ: Busiest time of year for us. How's reporting season unfolding at your end? It's been pretty busy out there.

[0:01:09] GB: I think it's been decent so far, like in the broader market. There's been some ups and downs within the portfolio. But broadly, we've confirmed thesis, let's say, on most of the stocks that we own and relatively happy with the results.

[0:01:24] SJ: Yes. We've been talking a lot about small-cap underperformance as has everyone else. I was flicking through the December letters from a lot of fund managers, and it's beginning to sound like excuses. All of this small-cap underperformance stuff, and we're probably as guilty as other people. But there is stuff out there working in small-cap land. This wasn't just that couple of months late last year, but there are stocks that are trading at very, very acceptable reasonable valuations if they deliver the right outcomes.

I've been saying both internally and externally, it's time to stop whinging about the environment out there and focusing on stocks that are going to deliver you results over a long period of time.

[0:02:07] GB: It’s spot on. I mean, this is the theory that even if the market doesn't recognize it, you can make that return over the years through dividends. But the market is recognizing it with stocks that are delivering to promise. So, I'll go through one here. NorBERT in Norway that we found owned for nearly five years now. They have set their targets, and they have just delivered, delivered, delivered, and we've been rewarded very handsomely for that. And I think they're definitely pockets that small-cap market where if you pick the right stocks, you're making good money.

[0:02:41] SJ: Yes, that's a small cap, European stock, which is that index has performed particularly badly. But yes, it's now trading at – it's still an illiquid stock, but trade at what 20-ish times? Twenty-ish times earnings? They've put out some guidance to double the profitability of that business over the next five years or so. So, it's a perfectly sensible valuation today for where the business is at, and we've done very well out of it, out of the earnings growth over the past five years, as much as out of multiple expansion. I think you get a bit of multiple expansion. But when you get it, the business has grown at earnings, then it makes a huge difference to the returns.

We talk about getting paid to wait a lot. I think that's the other thing that if the value of the business is growing during your investment period, then you don't care as much about how long it takes for that value to be realized. We've had Jen Track in the Australian portfolio at share price, that’s maybe 18 months. But it's five, eight to $7. It’s a bit of a different story. It was a turnaround. They've managed to turn the margins around and show a lot of growth. But I think it's just another example of if you are a profitable, cash-generative, growing business, investors are very, very willing to buy your shares, and in some cases, bid those prices up quite a bit. A lot of the companies that I've been talking to over the past couple of weeks are still – our EBITDA is doing X, Y and Zed, or our annual recurring revenue is growing at 20% per annum. 

[0:04:08] GB: Embedded cash flow is one of my favorites as well.

[0:04:10] SJ: You go and look at the financial statements, and it says you're reporting a loss and you're not paying in dividend. Even in the mining services space, we've had a couple of really good results there from [inaudible 0:04:20] over the past week. Those stocks are trading at four and five times earnings, but the dividend payout ratios, they've opted them, which is good. They're now yielding sort of 5% and 6% on the price, but they're still only paying 30% of their profits out to shareholders as dividends. I think until they fix that gap between what they're making and what shareholders are getting, then the share prices are going to continue to trade at a discount.

But look, I think it's pretty – there's not really, I think if you find the right stocks, there's not a lot of excuses for not making money in this type of environment. In fact, if anything on –

[0:04:54] GB: That's what we should pray for, right? We want this whole sector to stay cheap and we find the exceptions ideally.

[0:05:03] SJ: Yeah, I mean, if anything, I'm a bit worried that there's too much optimism creeping in more broadly out there. You've got the poster child for this latest rally Nvidia up 50. The share price is up 50% this calendar year. So, since the first of January, the share price is around 50%. And I'm seeing a fair bit of FOMO or fear of missing out, out there in terms of the way people are talking about where and how they're investing their money.

So, I thought we'd focus this podcast on our favorite topic, which is investing psychology, and maybe a bit of a walk back in time with you, Gareth. We'll talk a little bit about Nvidia and the market at the moment, but it's mostly about our journey of learning this topic. Maybe you can kick things off talking in a broad sense about how much you think it matters to investment returns.

[0:05:49] GB: Okay. So, I started investing about 30 years ago. And if you had talked to me, in the first five or six years of my investing experience, I would have told you that psychology was largely irrelevant as a skill for investors. I really wasn't aware of it as an important skill. Just work out the odds, bet accordingly, and if you've done a good job then buying cheap stocks, you'll make money.

I spend very little time wondering about why it is that someone might be selling me that stock cheaply. Look, I made mistakes over that period, for sure. But on average, it was a good experience and I managed to entirely avoid the tech bubble of 1999 to 2000, based on valuations alone, not really understanding anything, what was going on in the background.

I think soon thereafter, I had several epiphanies, some involve losing money, some involve missed opportunities, a lot of reading, and just general experience and maturity, hopefully. So, over that time, over a fairly short timeframe, my belief there really changed quite dramatically, so much so that if anytime in the last 20 or so years, you talk to me about investing psychology, I would have highlighted it as one of the most important skills for people to grasp and understand.

[0:07:06] SJ: I've argued on a number of occasions that you could make money out of the stock market without ever looking at a balance sheet or a P&L, if you really understand investing psychology, and you just use that as your trigger for, “I'm going to invest in the stocks at this time when I think people are behaving irrationally.” Pessimistically, on one end of the spectrum, and then irrationally, optimistically, on the other end of the spectrum. I think you could make money doing that without ever picking up a financial statement. That's how important, I believe, it has becoming.

I think the more technology comes into doing our job, the more artificial intelligence can do all of those things like analyzing balance sheets, and profit and loss statements. It's always going to be an important piece of due diligence. But I think for us as a firm, and as individuals, it's really the crux of what we do is understanding this piece of it and how the market as a whole reacts to these investor emotions across the population. It's not just you or someone else feeling these things. It happens on a very broad scale at the same time, and that's what drives a lot of your returns.

[0:08:16] GB: It drives a lot of that process, right? We're trying to harvest that, where we spend our time is where it’s specifically looking for those psychological mispricing sets.

[0:08:25] SJ: So, maybe go right back to when you actually first started.

[0:08:29] GB: It was really back in 2002. I'd started working at the Intelligent Investor with Greg Hoffman, and he was really the trigger for me. He was a couple of years ahead in terms of his understanding at the time. This was years before Daniel Kahneman had released his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, for the masses. But Kahneman and his partner, Tversky, had released a lot of papers, highlighting areas where our psychology and our behavioral shortcuts lead us astray. So, Greg and I were reading every single paper we could find from those two, going back decades. We pondered the Monty Hall problem. You may have read it many times on the Internet. This was years before I saw anyone else discussing it. We were pondering the Monty Hall problem.

Things like, if you ask a question for someone on an area outside their circle of expertise, you ask them the distance to Saturn, the planet Saturn, or the weight of a jumbo jet, and ask people to give you a 95% confidence interval answer, which means the range should contain the right answer 19 times out of 20. If you ask people, those kinds of things, they'll be wrong half the time. We are prone to overconfidence as a species.

So, we read widely, but without a doubt, the most impactful book for me was a recommendation of Charlie Munger. It’s called, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. I'm sure a lot of the listeners here have read it. If they haven't, I really do suggest they do. It's not an investing book, but it gives you some really important tools that can be useful when considering stock markets. This is was book that was written, I think, in 1984. It's an old book.

[0:10:10] SJ: It's fascinating that he wrote this book for the general public to try and train people to protect themselves against a lot of the sales tactics that have always been well-known by salespeople. Even if they weren't known academically, they knew what worked. The Hari Krishna is handing out flowers to you for free. They knew all about reciprocity, hundreds of years before this book was written. So, the concepts had been there. He was trying to educate the general public. Then, it sounds like if you listen to him, more than half the people that ended up buying it were salespeople who wanted to do a better job of fleecing people of their money.

[0:10:47] GB: I mean, it was always going to go that way, wasn't it? The incentives skewed that way.

[0:10:51] SJ: The book highlights a few areas where worrying can be and often is short-circuited. Reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, I think, authority and scarcity are the seven chapters of the book. There's lots of potential things to discuss there. I think, again, it was a sales from a consumer perspective. But a lot of the lessons that we've taken from it are about investing. That actually got me thinking a lot of what we do is actually the same process as someone trying to sell you something, right? The market is there every day – 

[0:11:28] GB: When I see other people's mistakes, mispriced, and act accordingly, right?

[0:11:32] SJ: And it’s asking you to make a decision. Do you want to buy? Or do you want to sell this stock? It's the same driving factors about whether you want to buy or sell anything else. But what particular areas did you want to focus on?

[0:11:43] GB: I don't want to do a book reading, obviously, but I thought we could take a few of the concepts and use them as a filter for looking at the market today. So, let's go straight to chapter four, social proof. This is the well-established and really well-proven idea that we look to other people to determine what is correct. So, we see something as more accurate, more likely to be right if other people are doing it, especially if that situation. It's unclear what the right course of action is. We will then look to other people for guidance.

[0:12:16] SJ: I just read this book and see my early 20s and went on. I was living in London with McCarthy at the time went on holidays to Spain with a friend of mine, and we're in this seaside town, might have been Marbella. One of those ones are all English tourists turn up. They were three restaurants down on the street at lunchtime. One of them was packed, and the other one only had one couple in it. He said to me, we've got to go to the busy one. That must be the good one. This was the days before Google reviews and everything. I said, everyone is just making that same decision, right? We're all here. We don't know what the quality of the food is.

I said, “I'll bet you if we go and sit in the other one where there's only one couple, there'll be more people that come in today. And by the time we left, that restaurant was equally as full as the other one.” There's nothing wrong with that, right? As a concept, you don't know which restaurant is good. It works 70% to 80% of the time in life, just follow other people because they've had more experience than you have.

[0:13:10] GB: Correct. Look, as usual, this is really an evolutionary mismatch. Our DNA, our wiring really evolved for life is hunt together on the savanna. There we lived in small groups, small tribes, maybe 50 to 70 people. Life was tough, cooperation, and social cohesion were absolute paramount in that battle for survival. Not fitting in, or insulting the wrong person could really get you expelled from the tribe, and this was at a time where that was a knee certain death sentence for people. So, we're wired for social harmony. We're wired for coherence with other people, and it worked pretty well in our past environment. It still works in a lot of areas of life today, but the stock market really isn't one of those areas.

[0:13:57] SJ: Absolutely not. I think, interestingly, there are tribes within tribes as well. I think even our own little community of contrarian people and value investors, sometimes it can be a mistake, just to follow that tribe, as well. Sometimes the bigger market-wide tribe is actually doing the right thing. The point about this is to try and think independently rather than differently just for the sake of being differently. 

[0:14:24] GB: Yes, I think that points right. In historical times, following social proof was the low downside, high upside choice, the option. You really only rock the boat in that world if you thought the chief was about to take the boat over a waterfall, and it was worth the risk of being ostracized. In markets really, it's largely the inverse. Buffett points this out without saying that in the stock market, you pay a hefty price for a cheery consensus. I think those are the words he used. I think that pull of social proof is an important influence in stock markets at the moment, even more so than usual, and definitely more so than six months ago when there was a bit more pessimism around.

[0:15:03] SJ: Yes. I do think that this social proof issue has been amplified dramatically by social media. You are far more aware of what other people are doing and making out there than you were. We're seeing it, certainly, at the moment in AI, Nvidia’s share price. This is a great business. I think that's one of the key differences here from some of there have been examples of things that I've just thought were completely, utterly idiotic that we've written about, get swift on the ASX, where the business was quite clearly nothing, probably shouldn't say this, but audio pixels still listed today. I can't believe how long that has lasted in terms of the business that's never generated any revenue and just keep raising capital from shareholders.

This is a real profitable business. It's growing – its earnings have grown so much in this wave of AI enthusiasm that its multiple, that it trades out is actually not at historical highs, because certainly, its forward-looking multiple is not as historical highs. So, this is a real business, but the frenzy has just affected everything. So, Nvidia made very small by its market cap standards, investments in five or six other AI companies last week, and their share prices were all up 30% or 40%. It's got that same feel as this meme rally environment of 6,021, where things were just running like crazy. Everyone's jumping on the bandwagon. Again, as it usually isn't these types of things, the story itself is logical from a narrative perspective. Does it justify today's share price? This is not a question that anyone's asking.

[0:16:38] GB: It's probably not even, like we're probably not even sitting here claiming that the share price is wrong. It's more the phenomenon of how people get sucked into it from here. They may do all right. I really can't tell you that. But I don't think it's a game we want to play, and it's a hard thing to not play for a lot of especially institutional investors.

[0:16:59] SJ: Yes. Not owning them at the moment is hurting you certainly in a relative sense quite dramatically. And you are seeing people. I've seen it turn up in a number of funds, top five, six holdings, for the past couple of months that you just sit there and I don't know, it's definitely FOMO play.

[0:17:17] GB: I think that choosing the pain of potential losses, versus the pain of missing out right now. Because everything's going up. It's classic FOMO, isn't it?

[0:17:27] SJ: There's a, I guess, it's a reason why FOMO exists. Another common principle called this regret minimization desire that you actually, you're not trying to optimize your outcomes necessarily. You're trying to minimize the amount of regret that you feel, and that can be not doing something. It can also be doing something that, if I lose doing this, and everyone else is losing, I'm not going to feel that bad about it. But if it goes really well, everyone else is making money and I'm not part of it, I'm going to feel an enormous amount of regret about that.

[BREAK]

[0:18:00] ANNOUNCER: Stay tuned, we'll be back in just a sec. Are you a long-term investor with a passion for unloved bargains? So are we. Forager Funds is a contemporary value fund manager with a proven track record for finding opportunities in unlikely places. Through our Australian and international shares funds, investors have access to small and mid-size investments not accessible to many fund managers in businesses that many investors likely haven't heard of. We have serious skin in the game too, meaning we invest right alongside our investors.

For more information about our investments, visit foragerfunds.com. If you like what you're hearing and what we're drinking, please like, subscribe, and pass it on. Thanks for tuning in. Now, back to the chat.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

[0:18:42] SJ: I think another factor that feeds into that FOMO is – well, it's not a factor that feeds into it, it's a subsequent psychological shortcoming that will let you make the decision that you want to make. So, you're suffering FOMO. You decide you want to own AI stocks, because you're missing out. Then this narrative fallacy really comes into play, right? All I need here is a compelling-sounding story that's going to justify the decision. I've already decided that I want to make, and I'm seeing a lot of that at the moment.

This is the idea that we like any sort of story that connects a few dots for us, whether the conclusion is logical or not, as long as the story itself makes sense. We tend to believe the start and the endpoint. So, that story at the moment is about artificial intelligence and the world's demand for the chips that Nvidia produces, and its dominant position in the provision of those very, very specialist chips. That narrative is one that is irrefutable, that they are facts, and that is the position that the business is in. But the question you got to ask as an investor is does that justify today's share price? That's the bit that people leave out because it's a much harder question to answer. So, we just answer the easy one. We already know what decision we want to make.

[0:19:58] GB: And ability.

[0:19:59] SJ: We take the scenario too.

[0:20:00] GB: That’s a lot.

[0:20:01] SJ: Yes. That one works – it works at times like this and it works in more pessimistic markets in a different way as well. Are there any other chapters from Influence that you wanted to discuss today?

[0:20:11] GB: I wasn't going to talk about this one. But anchoring is one thing to consider here. If you did jump into this boom. The next bit is going to be the stock market is down 20%, or those sectors are down 20%, and everyone's going to say, “I'm going to sell, but I'm just going to wait until I get back to my purchase price first.” So, that's one to watch out for, for anyone that is playing that game.

[0:20:33] SJ: Just really quickly, we had a little bit of that with our own business. We saw over the past year that it wasn't at the worst point in our underperformance that we got lots of redemptions. It was once the unit price got back to the entry price for a lot of people that they decided they wanted to take their money out. I've been having this conversation with a lot of people about some of the other fund managers out there, whether it's Platinum or Magellan, just running this business ourselves. This idea that the performance is going to recover and the flows will, the inflows will start coming back into the funds. I just don't think it actually works like that. There's a lot of people sitting there saying, “When I want to get my money back”, which, certainly in Magellan case, given the quality of the portfolios that they own may have already happened. You start getting people saying, “Well, now that I'm back to square, I'm going to take my money out.”

[0:21:19] GB: I thought maybe, we can touch on chapter three, commitment and consistency. Again, this is another output from our evolutionary past. Others judge us on the quality and consistency of our decisions. It was often a matter of life and death back in prehistoric times. By default, to change your mind on anything, really is to make a declaration that I was wrong. So, we do some pretty stupid things in order to avoid changing our mind, and cross our fingers and continue down a path that we probably should not. Like with other topics covered in influence, and elsewhere. A lot of this operates at the subconscious level. We're not consciously going out to dig for information that confirms our biases and we're not avoiding deliberately information that disconfirms our theses. But it is important to understand that it is probably going on in most of your data collection and whatnot, decision-making.

[0:22:18] SJ: Yes. It really is a huge one. I see it a lot with cash holdings in portfolio. Big portfolio allocation decisions that I made a decision, I was worried about where markets were going. I'm now 30% cash in my portfolio, more in some situations. That can be at a fun level. It can be at an individual investors level. Things don't play out the way you've expected. I'd say at the moment, the near term, shall we say inflation and interest rate data is not proving to be as bad as was feared 6 or 12 months ago. It's difficult, right?

If you've made that decision, and you've said, “I'm really worried about inflation. I'm going to get it cashed.” It may not have been the wrong decision at that point in time. But to absorb the information that comes along and the facts and say, “Well, there is a point here where I actually need to change my mind, and accept that I was wrong about that, it's really, really hard to do.” One tool we've found useful in our individual stock research, I think, it's useful at a portfolio level is, whenever you make any decision, write down a bunch of reasons why you would change your mind. What would it take here for you to actually change your mind? If you can't answer that question, you haven't thought deeply enough about the decision that you're making.

[0:23:29] GB: If you don't answer that question, you will really change the story in your head by the time you come back to it two years later.

[0:23:34] SJ: Yes. For sure.

[0:23:36] GB: I think that awareness as a first step is an important part of it. There is a point I want to hammer home here. Look, I've been aware of psychological shortcomings of our hardwiring for decades now. It's a topic I'm naturally very interested in, and yet, I still suffer from these shortcomings on a relatively regular basis. There's the saying that 90% of drivers think they're above average. I think that's a really funny statistic. It's probably roughly true.

[0:24:04] SJ: I think, it’s actually male drivers, wasn't it? Ninety percent of male drivers?

[0:24:06] GB: Yes. Women do nothing wrong, mate. But at a meta-level, an awareness of that, awareness of that fact that 90% of drivers think that they’re above average, probably does actually make you a better driver. I am aware that I might be overconfident in, let's say, wet conditions. I might be aware that the other driver over there is prone to overconfidence and may make a mistake, so I might be a bit more cautious. So, I think understanding psychological biases is quite similar. It won't make you immune, but it will offer some protection.

So, I guess with that in mind, I thought we could discuss a few of our own errors from this over the years. The one, I think, is most pertinent for me at the moment is this idea of overconfidence. Again, that doesn't get a specific in Cialdini’s book, but a lot of Kahneman and Tversky’s work was around the idea of overconfidence, particularly the more data we collect, the more confident we are in our decision-making, even if it's bad data. Even if it's lower quality than what we had before. Even if it's just random numbers buck from thin air.

When I go back, I skip through that tech bubble very easily with no knowledge of psychology. In fact, I was bagging some of the best investments I ever made in my career over that 1999, 2000 period, by buying out of favor value. Then I learned a lot about psychology. The next test came along in the form of the GFC. Yes, I copped a few flesh wounds, but I was relatively unscathed, and the following few years after that were really, really good for me. Then, I think this background experience here encouraged me to think that the next time I came across the stock market in a mania, I would be able to identify it before the fact.

And 2021, ‘22 was really a slap in the face to that theory for me. We had seen a lot of the excesses. We'd identified them and discuss them significantly inside. We moved the portfolio in the right direction. But we did it with really insufficient vigor. So, right direction, but we just needed to do a lot more of it.

Perversely, I wonder. I have no proof. But I wonder if this was one of those situations where a bit of experience was a negative. I have a feeling that younger version of me might have sailed through ‘21, ’22 with less damage, basically, than we did. I would have been able to shift that portfolio a lot quicker, maybe more immune, or less confident in my ability to see this would actually help me to just see it.

[0:26:46] SJ: Yes. It's really interesting that you bring that up, because I certainly feel like I've got less confident as I've got older, and typically is, I think, a bigger issue for younger people than it is older people. I will never, ever forget a letter we got sent at Intelligent Investor. It was a two-line letter, back in the day where people wrote letters. It said, “I've never met you guys, but I know that you're young, and I know that you're male, because only a young male could have that much confidence in their opinions.”

It really hit home for me to actually start thinking about that. In some ways, the example that you bring up, though, we were actually confident enough in that very youthful part of our lives to go against the crowd without any consequences at all, right? I think there's two things there. I think there's that. We were more, I think, comfortable just being out on a limb, and that is true of a lot of different disciplines.

Most of the great scientific discoveries and mathematical problems that have been solved were done by people in their early 20s, when they had nothing to lose. And they generally got more conservative about claiming that things were world-changing as they got older. So, it may not even necessarily be overconfidence. Then, the second thing is you're doing a different job.

[0:28:12] GB: Yes. Not managing other people's money. You're having to raise funds, or the usual.

[0:28:18] SJ: I don't know. Who knows how many people listening to this are fund managers. But it's a whole bunch of different psychological problems is what I've learned over the past 10 years. Some are the same and some are quite different when you are running a portfolio and it's your job to get out there and invest in stocks. One of the things about that 2021 period that still causes me some angst and distress is that it was not as obvious to me what to do. I think in the previous ones, there were very, very sensibly priced safe havens in which you could go and make really good returns, owning pretty good quality businesses, particularly the [inaudible 0:28:53].

[0:28:55] GB: I think 2007 was a bit more of an everything bubble.

[0:28:59] SJ: Yes. I certainly had more damaging experiences in those, certainly that 2008, ’09 crisis. One of my larger investments, TimberCorp went bust when that financial crisis hit and I think that was almost certainly an error of overconfidence, complicated Excel models about how much cash that investment was going to produce. So, I think it was one. The reflection on all of that for me is that you need to recognize them in yourself. And then, you also need to recognize the environment that you're in. What is the mistake that I am most likely to be making at the moment? All right, we're in a more bullish market than we were in six months ago. The risks here are rising. You could almost have some sort of clock or pressure gauge. This is FOMO.

[0:29:51] GB: FOMO, overconfidence, all the, let's say the biases of excess, right?

[0:29:55] SJ: Yes. Then, we're in a market that's down 20%. The economy's looking bad. We're getting lots of downgrades. There's a lot of different psychological emotions that are at play at a time, and you need to turn the radar up on a narrative bias around how bad everything is going to get and I'm starting to believe this story because I'm fearful about where markets are going to go. Over extrapolation of what's happened recently into the future.

I know, from my own experience. I'm much more susceptible to the problems in the more buoyant markets. I've been fully invested in every single market downturn, my whole life. Other people, if you look back over the past 20 years, and you've been 25%, 30% cash, through all of those market downturn periods, then you are more susceptible to sitting on your hands in that environment, and the psychological problems are going to arise at that point in time, more so, necessarily, than more bullish market.

[0:30:50] GB: It’s a very good point.

[0:30:52] SJ: It's something I've thought a lot about more recently, is actually, I say, you can never avoid the mistakes. But I think understanding the market context and environment that you're in can really help you identify what am I more likely to be doing wrong?
 
 

[0:31:07] GB: Yes. Where are your mistakes likely to come from? And how do you defend against them? Very good.

[0:31:11] SJ: Well, I hope you've enjoyed that, listeners. Please get in touch with any feedback that you've got or any topics you'd like us to discuss in future. We'll be back and thank you for tuning in.

[END]