Financial Autonomy

Episode 66 – The reality of negative returns - knowledge is power Investment markets don’t always go up. In fact they go down on a pretty regular basis. Is that a shock to you? I suspect not. Yet virtually none of the commentary on investing talks about negative returns – markets going down. But when I speak with clients, especially new clients, usually somewhere in their top 3 issues is not wanting to lose money – hardly surprising! So in today’s post, let’s bust open this taboo subject and talk openly about the reality of negative returns. So you’re about to start investing. Your driver is the goal of growing your savings – building wealth, and with that comes the choices in life that is our central theme here at Financial Autonomy. But you would be unusual if you didn’t worry about losing your money. Mountains of behavioural finance research tells us that we humans fell loses much more powerfully than we enjoy equivalent gains. So let’s look at the realities. If you invest in a portfolio that is either 10