Chapter 8 of 'There are no grown ups' Most professional fund managers measure performance relative to ‘The Index’: a collection of major stocks in the market concerned.  Each major market has its own index: the CAC in France, DAX in Germany.  Larger markets may have several.  The UK offers the

Chapter 7 of 'There are no grown ups' Equity ownership is ownership of an underlying ‘thing’, which might be a house, a building, a company, a vehicle, or almost any other asset. That thing might be owned just by you, or part-owned (shared) by you and someone else, or by

Chapter 6 of 'There are no grown ups' Most of us understand property and its financing rather better than the financing of companies & governments.  Whether as renters, buyers using a mortgage, or cash buyers, or as the children of those providing our home, property is understood from personal experience Say

Chapter 5 of 'There are no grown ups' If you have some money, and want to ‘make it work for you’, your main options are: 1. Lend it to a government, company, or person, who will pay it back to you with interest.  The interest may be paid every year/

Chapter 4 of 'There are no grown ups' The money we leave to our loved ones will be eroded by two main things: taxes & legal fees.   Lawyers are another class of ‘Grown ups’ that we are trained to trust, and defer to.  The safest thing is to start with the

Chapter 3 of 'There are no grown ups' The ‘Trader’s option’: bet the ranch, if you lose, you get fired, if you win, you get a vast bonus, promotion, etc. Losses are paid for by your employer / clients, but you get to keep a slice of the gains. Heads

Chapter 2 of 'There are no grown ups' What is winning?  And how can you ‘win’?  Marketing billions are spent persuading the public that ‘winning’ covers (a) Making money of any sort (not making a loss), or (b) Making a loss that is smaller than that made by a XYZ

There must be some people who read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and see themselves as Gandalf, or read Harry Potter books and identify as Dumbledore.  But most of us are seeing things from the perspective of one of the children, or hobbits, placed centre stage only by the novelist’