maynardcase.co.uk linkfest

I hate:

* people who stand on the left on the London Underground escalators
* adverts indicating that you can become a millionaire property developer
* tequila
* anyone who is smug about owning a house
* my own ability to procrastinate
* the Daily Mail
* people who ask questions that they could find the answers to if they just looked for a moment (I’m thinking the Metro letters page, here)
* hard-line creationists
* people who leave mobile phones on their desks to ring incessantly (particularly those whose voicemail rings them back)
* people who carelessly get people’s names the wrong way round in emails (i.e. calling someone informally by their surname, just because our internal address book is in the format Surname, Forename)
* adverts that imply that the people who run high-performing investment funds are geniuses who can beat the market, rather than just lucky

… or be fat.

(an advert for Krispy Kreme donuts - buy a box of a dozen and be a hero!)

Bugger.

Well, let’s see. I could … take a photo of this poster as well! And write a rant about how annoying it is to be nagged by the bloody Open University to get my arse in gear. I mean, really - when I’m walking home every evening I get this big hulking whinge in the corner of my eye about how I should be doing something more interesting. Well, I’m walking home, dammit - you expect me to be beavering away at some poxy “degree” while walking home? How about when it’s raining? Idiots.

Bastards. I think that macho ads like this are really, really annoying. This is because of a few very simple facts:

• The stock market generally goes up (over a long period of time, where long > 5 years)
• At the moment the FTSE index has been going up steadily for about a year
• Funds that are managed by people generally don’t do any better than “tracker” funds which just invest in whatever is in an index (eg. the FTSE 100). So rather than having to make decisions about what shares to buy or sell, you just invest in all the companies in the index. Zero effort and so a lower charge. These tracker funds generally perform better than 75% of managed funds over a long period of time (ie. 5 years or more).

So these idiots can spout off about “beating the market” and many people will believe them. And the reason that they are advertising now: because the market’s going up and so any fool can give decent returns on the money (barring anything disasters). The fact that there’s only a 1 in four chance of them doing better than the trackers is obviously not very important to their marketing department.