Lessons from 300 years of stock market advice

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28:18That's Vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description though, so you can just click that. the idea that it's tied up in your your identity of self did you see that shift at all did you see like in the 60s it became more inclusive or has it is it still like that now there are there are shifts one of the big sort of stories that we trace is kind of well how are women eventually incorporated like not so much into the market because they're always there you go back to the 18th century they're there they're providing capital they're always a presence on the market But rhetorically, they're always excluded.

28:54So you don't see them in the pages of the texts. Big turning point in the 1860s. 1863 is the first text written for financial advice for a female audience. So it's written anonymously by a banker's daughter. So we later know that it's Emma Sophia Galton, who is a daughter of a Birmingham banker. And so she kickstarts this trend of writing for women, of rhetorically recognizing that women are part of this market and addressing women's concerns, women's priorities, and how to navigate the market as a woman. But it takes such a long time for the figure of the public female financial expert to kind of arrive on the scene.

29:34And they're always in a minority. And a lot of the kind of textual constructions of the investor are still hyper-masculinized. I mean, there are lots of examples of it today. A lot of the rhetoric around speculation is very hyper-masculine. You move into the 1980s, by which point, you know, women have been allowed onto London Stock Exchange. You would imagine that the kind of macho financial culture would be fading, particularly with the decline of the trading floor for a lot of securities around Big Bang and the rest of it. But of course, that's the kind of, you know, it reaches a new level of hyper-masculinity with Wall Street, greed is good, the kind of language.

30:11The Gordon Gekko kind of in the 80s. and even like bull and bear are very masculine images, aren't they? Or like big, like the slang around the markets, like you say, is very aggressive, masculine. One thing that made me think from the research that you did is even books that are celebrated today are born out of the same kind of world. So you talk about Benjamin Graham and the creation of almost value investing off the back of technical analysis collapsing, people reading charts or whatever. And out of that, it was like, let's go to value in businesses. And this is still logic now that holds up.

30:53Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, arguably some of the greatest investors ever, still celebrated today, but they show all of the hallmarks of these other types of literature that we're laughing at as scams. It's the same stuff. Yeah. Well, that's one of the benefits of studying this as a sort of genre of writing. and you see all these connections and overlaps and kind of replications of history. And yeah, it isn't to say that it's all the same. It isn't to say that it's all a scam. And you have to distinguish between, I guess one of the fundamental distinctions is between a how-to literature, which is kind of basically just explaining what it is and how you do it, but it's not making you any massive promises.

31:32And then there's the how to win or how to succeed literature, which is going for, it's not just telling you how to do it, but promising you that you're going to win. And kind of that distinction was coined, the novelist G.K. Chesterton coined that like a century ago when he was looking at success literature. And I think it's a useful distinction. And so there's obviously a lot of good work in this field of people that are not overselling and not promising you the earth. And not saying you'll get rich with doing very little work, making very little effort. But all the kind of tropes and ideas are still embedded in this literature.

32:06And it's still, it's why people keep reading it is because one more book, if I read one more book, look at one more website, read one more thing, I'm going to find the secret. And it is just this lure of the insiders telling the outsiders, look, I'm going to share with you the secrets. It's fascinating to look at how kind of in the 1980s, I mean, this is history now, but when all the public utilities were being sold, you know, British Gas, Tell Cid, the advertising campaign around that, how it's being sold. This is a state that's deciding to privatize public utilities. But the way that's sold to the average investor is in the form of like an inside tip, like tell Sid, this is a secret.

32:46I'll get you in on the deal. So even the state is kind of borrowing some of these techniques about I'll put you on the inside. I'll put you onto a good thing. I'll share with you the secret that will make you easy money. And so the ideas, the lure, the appeal is rife. It is throughout. it kind of defines the genre and it makes sure that people still want to consume it. Well, that's human nature, right? That's not the genre. That's human nature and the genre appeals to it. Why, if we could say that there's the secret, that the promise is the ability to beat the market, you know, why is it that when the market has returned such good returns for a long time that people are so obsessed with trying to beat it?

33:27I think that's another of our sort of big questions that we were kind of really trying to answer. Because I think there's a real turning point in the post-war world by the time you get to sort of Burton Malkiel in particular with the random walk down Wall Street as the first to really popularize all the kind of scientific economic work that's been done on studying the market, efficient markets, and kind of the idea that you can't beat the market, that it's just an illusion. You know, and the natural result of that is well, passive investment, that if you can't beat them, just play the market, just kind of accept market returns.

34:06And he's one of the first big sellers to really promote this idea to a wide audience. But in the same time, his text is full of contradictions, you could say, because at the same time that he's dispelling all these ideas that you can beat the market with XYZ secrets, you can beat the market. He admits, like telling the average investor that you cannot beat the market is like telling a six-year-old that Santa Claus doesn't exist. It takes the zing out of life. That's what he says. So even he admits he's a proselytizer essentially for passive investing. A proselytizer. You want to hit that one? Sorry.

34:43What in the world? I know I've got a good vocabulary. What is a proselytizer? Sounds like a good time. I did wonder what that was for. Oh, now I know. Are you going to have to proselytize a button? Yeah. It kind of has religious connotations, but it's kind of like to propagate for an idea, to kind of try and sell an idea. Like an advocate of that. Yeah, like you're full of this religious intensity. You're going to share the word. This thing is magic. This thing is great. I need to share it. So you're kind of like a propagandist for an idea. So you're out for passive investing? The logic of all of his ideas, and that's a text that I think is still in print, is hugely influential.

35:29Discrediting a lot of the more active, he also came up with it, the idea of the blindfolded monkeys throwing darts at a board. And they're going to pick better stocks than an expert fund manager, that kind of idea. But at the same time, he admits within the text itself, active investing is fun. Trying to beat the market is fun. And so some of the text is about that as well. So it's a kind of ambiguous sales pitch. So even the people that are kind of selling the idea of passive investment are also admitting that active investment comes with a lot of thrills, back to the idea of investment as fun, as exciting.

36:05It's a leisure activity. But it also, I think, wraps around to those ideas about manhood, masculinity, self-realization through the market. And I think through the 20th century and into the present, you get that blurring of the genres between stock market advice and self-help. Yeah. We spoke to someone yesterday and they are a believer of active. They were skeptical of passive investing, especially market weighted indexes where, you know, you're essentially momentum investing, as she put. and what I found was she was very honest she said I've been wrong about this for over a decade now in terms of active is going to make its moment but active will have its moment now because interest rates are changing and do you find do you find that throughout time that people can be faced with evidence that says they're wrong and they still like they still want to drink the kool-aid in that sense?

37:05Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think the genre of stock market advice is very kind of durable. So in the face of crises, crashes, radical economic downturns and the rest of it, it survives. It never seems to get discredited. The advice can kind of accommodate almost being proven wrong because a lot of it places the onus on the individual investor. If you've lost money, then it's your fault. Your emotions were wrong. You weren't man enough. exactly there's all kinds of get outs there yeah you didn't do it right so it's a kind of you know that the place and all the responsibility on the individual so the advice kind of just shifts and particularly those years where there's such a big battle between technical and fundamental analysis that it's very easy for them to kind of pass the buck and kind of point to others for well no if you did that you you would have lost money but if you followed us you would have made money so So whatever crisis comes up, you can even see it in, you know, when COVID came along, lots of opportunistic advisors kind of saying, well, we can help you make money out of this seemingly disastrous kind of health, but also economic crisis.

38:13So I think it's a genre that can kind of survive any sort of evidence that sort of proves it wrong in many ways, because all that basic appeal, that appeals to our human nature, is still in place. there's always the chance of, all right, this time it's different, particularly when it's attached to a new technology. This time it's different. This time it's different. It never is. Do you find when people start investing in the stock market that they, most people, like the majority of people will be like, oh, I'm going to pick Apple, I'm going to pick Tesla. Like they just pick random stocks. Or do you find that from your research, more and more people are going passive?

38:49I know when I started, I was just picking random stocks, not random ones, but once I thought we're going to go to the moon or be up in next year or so, do you find many people are like, actually, look, let me just get it in an index and leave it and be passive? Or do most people start active, get burned, and then learn that you should probably be a bit more passive? I think it's really, I think a lot of people are turning to passive investing. I think it's bigger than ever before. And it's interesting how it's a keystone of a lot of the kind of fire advice. advice and all of that movement. I think it's no coincidence that that really took off in the years of a very, very prolonged bull market.

39:30They're doing the same thing as well, aren't they? Promising the secrets to them. Maybe for people who don't know what this fire - Financial independence, retire early. It's like, you know, I can take you from a very normal job to being retired within a few years, if you buy my book. But basically it's live off less than you earn and invest the rest, but take that to a hyper level. So if you could say 50 % of whatever you bring in on an annual basis, you can retire quite quickly. And they provide a very basic calculation for that. A lot of it's based on the Trinity study, the 4 % rule, and it's just retiring quick.

40:06But it's been commoditized in a self-help way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's good to the extent that it is publicizing a lot of good ideas around financial management and stuff like that. And it's good that it's promoting passive investment rather than pick the stocks and get rich. It's not peddling a simple message in that sense. But at the same time, it's kind of all of the, you know, it's very anecdotal and very, this is what I did and sharing the secrets of what they did during a very long bull market. we're not sure if the next 10 years are going to look like the last 10 years a lot of money a lot of them have you know their computer program is on 200 grand a year so it's easy for them to save 100 you know but they say extreme frugality anyone can get there and they show them out like the calculation and one thing i would say is you know someone coming new to any area you assume there's a level of expertise that you would need access to to get into it so if i was going to go into medicine i wouldn't just walk into a hospital and go you know what i can possibly chop up anyone in here and i'll be fine i think the doctors are probably quite skilled but like within within finance it's almost the opposite of that and i think probably why the literature is so persistent is because most people who know nothing think that you need to know a lot does that make does it make sense what i'm saying so it gives space for these pseudo experts to come forward and go i'll be the teacher because it's really complicated over here And if you do it wrong, you're screwed.

41:36I think, yeah, again, it's hard to generalize. There's so many different kinds of advice out there, different kinds of providers. So there are some that are stripping it down to essentials and saying, well, this is really easy. Anyone can do it. There are others who are mystifying a lot of it and kind of I have all the secrets and for a fee, I will share them. So there's all kinds of different strategies for kind of establishing yourself in this market. But I think a lot of it is trading off the idea that a lot of people grow up, they're not taught financial literacy in schools particularly thoroughly.

42:08It doesn't really come up all that much. So a lot of people enter adulthood not knowing a lot of basic stuff. And so that creates a kind of big market for people who are honestly trying to help those people and spread financial literacy. But it also, of course, creates a lot of opportunities for those who perhaps, you know, have less honest aims and kind of peddling, you know, get rich quick schemes, whatever they might look like. So through the introduction of marketing into the space, so I'm one of these people that I can spread the information for free. People can consume it for free and I can get paid.

42:43Do you feel that that will change the landscape for this kind of, because these people, there's always a back intention there. There's always like they want to sell something. They've got, you know, there's like an ulterior motive. Whereas now, all you need is attention to earn money. You don't need to sell anything. I think that's a good point. And it's, you know, getting a historian to kind of make any prediction about the future is like, we're really bad at it. Maybe people like you were studying me 300 years ago and this guy called Damien. He was a dodgy motherfucker.

43:19Yeah, I think, well, it's still playing out, the kind of the power of the internet to change a lot of these equations. And I think one of the things is that financial advice, financial literacy education has never been more accessible. And, you know, there's a very good quality advice has never been more accessible. But I think it's a bit too early to say whether that is really going to change the picture long term, because it does take people's attention, does take people to follow those lessons, internalize them. And of course, it doesn't solve the broader kind of structural issues with the economy that, as we were kind of alluding to with maybe fire, that maybe some of that is less relevant to someone who's on minimum wage is really struggling, is relying on a food bank.

44:09The idea that they can put a percentage of their weekly pay into an index fund is wishful thinking. So, I mean, financial advice can do a huge amount of good, but at the same time, it's not the solution to everything. I think there's another conversation that people might not realize that happens is people talk about things because they get views. So, you know, you talk about a particular stock because it's a popular stock. It doesn't mean it's a good investment, but you get more views. Yeah, and the views are money. They are literally, it's like you're mining oil out the ground. You get the views, you earn ad revenue.

44:46So people in my space are incentivized to talk about certain topics solely for that reason. And they're also incentivized to lean towards the negative because that will get them more clicks. And we can see that in the data. So we have click-through rate, which is what percentage of the people who've seen this thumbnail have clicked. And if I pull a shocked face, that will be 2 % higher than if I pull a normal face, a happy face. So the incentives now to lean negative, to lean towards popular topics will mean that the people who are influencing the market are being influenced by the market. And then you get a point where Tesla is the most bought retail stock on the planet and is by all metrics massively overvalued, you know, because it's the most, everyone's thinking, well, if all the experts are talking about it, it must be good.

45:30But they're only doing it because people watching it because they want to hear that people think it's good. it's kind of called performativity the the academic term don't press the buzzer

45:43but it's it's kind of which is just a fancy term for sort of saying self-fulfilling prophecy so a lot of these you know and again this goes back to to print advisors and journalists know that if they talk about a particular stock if they hype a particular stock it's going to move the market so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and there's evidence that this goes way back into of the 19th century, where they're aware of that power. And so it's not quite the same as what you're saying, but it's kind of an awareness that, okay, so what I talk about might move the market in a particular way. And so the huge scale of Tesla now, it's funded by that kind of loop.

46:21It's difficult to see how that's going to be broken because the more people are talking about it, the more hits, the more people are going to buy that stock and what will ever break that cycle. It's kind of, it's crazy to me how everything you've described, you could have just been talking about YouTube right now and nothing has changed in the 300 years. I think, yeah, to some extent that's true. And we're always fascinated when we see those echoes, those parallels, those early examples. I think certain things have changed, but it's more of a kind of development of seeds that we can see in the kind of 18th, 19th century.

46:58The scale is completely different. The kind of blurring of the boundaries between sort of stock market advice literature and self-help literature, those two things have blended in really interesting and complex ways. And that's kind of quite new, even if we're tracing the seeds of that back a long way as historians were always looking for precedents and early examples. but there is a kind of change i think if we're looking for things that have changed because that's interesting as well it's this kind of what's often called the financialization of everyday life and how the financial is so embedded in people's sort of personal life everyday life family life to view yourself as an investment the best investment you can make is in yourself exactly yeah popular now and and kind of maximizing yourself financially looking at your asset streams?

47:45How can I maximize my asset streams and my family's asset streams? And it's financializing every aspect of your daily life and your family life, encouraging that sort of blurring of boundaries. As an expert over the last 300 years of the stock market, do you invest yourself? Well, it's interesting. For a long time, I didn't really having no sort of, you know, wasn't brought up in a family that invested. The stock market to me was something that I engaged with very much historically. I was fascinated by historically. But there's a kind of that idea almost of object distance. You know, you want to retain your objectivity to it.

48:22You don't want to be invested yourself emotionally and financially. You just want to study it historically. So for a long time, particularly as I was studying the history of fraud for so many years. It kind of colors your views a little bit. But kind of perhaps beginning to look more at the historic evolution of passive investing and that kind of thing and the key texts of that. I found myself being influenced by that discussions with my co-authors and others that we got involved in the project and kind of, so it was a learning experience for me to kind of connect up what I'd always been interested in historically with what I might do with my own money.

49:02So yeah, it was through this process that I began passive investing, not stock picking. This process got me passively investing instead of I was definitely stock picking and crypto picking and just picking whatever I thought was going to make money. But yeah, this journey has been that. Now I'm a big fan of passive investing. This is why I hope I'm a net positive in the financial niche or whatever. But do you think the overall genre itself is a positive influence? um i'd say it's it's so much of a mixed picture i'd say it's hard to to kind of say as a whole it's been positive because there's so many kind of cases of fraud of interested advice of kind of selling the wrong kind of message and selling fake hope in many ways so i think it's a mixed picture yeah yeah so i think there's there's there's so many examples where it's not ended well for people.

49:57It's given people false hope, just playing to this idea that you can get rich, you can succeed without really trying, without really making an effort. So I think there is, we can trace back, good advice, sensible messages, things that have helped people through the centuries, definitely. But riddled throughout the genre, all these kind of false hopes and things that are delusive, that are leading people down blind alleys. And even with the kind of message of passive investment being a good thing, even that can be kind of perhaps oversold as being the solution to all your problems. The market only ever goes up.

50:36And it's kind of, well, if we look since 2009 and the 2020 blip, it's been on a very upward curve. And all the people who've made money out of passive investment in that period, great, great for them. Their timing was perfect. But can we really say the next 10, 15 years are going to be like that. So I think sometimes it's slightly oversold as this is a surefire way to make guaranteed money. So even something that is a sensible, I think there's so much evidence to say that it is sensible. It's a good thing to do to try and beat inflation. That even passive investment can be oversold given with too much of a kind of promise that you cannot lose well.

51:16I've been guilty of that. And I would say that the way that maybe passive investing was, I over internalized it as a positive was I'm unhappy in my job. I don't know what I want to do with my life. Oh, here's this passive investment. That's the thing that like one day will set me free. Whereas actually what you're committing to there is 30 years of being miserable. Do you know what I mean? Like it's not the answer in that sense. It's not the answer to your deep like unhappiness or just like frustration at your own situation. You might not like your job. Passive index fund investing isn't going to make that go away, you know, but that's, I found when I found it, I was like, oh, here it is.

51:53Here's the answer. I'll be happy in 30 years. Do you know what I mean? And luckily, it's led me to a position in a career where I am happy through talking about it. And I think it's like a routine, like having a shower every day. Do you know what I mean? You should do it because it's good for you, like you say, from inflation, but it's not going to fix your life. Yeah. And that's a kind of, if that's the message and people understand that and people are happy to kind of plan for a long-term economic future through that, then that's great. I think that's a positive thing, but it's kind of, there's still emotions attached to passive investing.

52:25And I think a lot of people who bought in at the wrong time to put the money in having been told, well, the stock market only ever goes up. Look at my graph. This is what happened to my money when I put it in 2010 or whatever it might be. It's, you know, there are risks, there are emotions involved that you log into your account and you You see, oh, I was up yesterday and I'm down today. And kind of, there's still a kind of emotional side to it. It's not going to solve all your problems. And I think because there's not quite that kind of instant payoff, that that's what drives people still back to stop picking.

53:01There's always that appeal of, look, I'm 100 % up today. Yeah. That's exciting. That's fun. That's thrilling. Yeah. And would you say then, you know, if you were advising someone that was going into this world of active literature, like financial advice literature, would you say then that's what you should need to look out for? The people that are promising the quick returns, all the things that people would say, get rich quick and I've got the answer. Is this the kind of literature that you would try and put to one side? I think, yeah, it's partly that. I think just stopping for a moment and evaluating who's giving the advice, what are their credentials, why are they giving me this advice?

53:40Those kinds of questions should be there. But as well, think about your own motivation and what you're trying to get out of it. If it's long-term economic planning, thinking about your financial future, thinking 30 years down the line. And if you've got money, you can put aside every month and passive investing might well be the thing to do. But if you're after a thrill, if you want that excitement, then stop picking might be the answer. But realize that it's a gamble. realize that you're not going to beat the market you know 99 of day traders don't beat the market i think that's the you know the stats of one of the major studies yeah and you know increasingly you're you're competing against algorithms in terms of your trading so you might have access to all the latest market data on your on your um on your phone on your computer but you know the idea of beating the market is such a seductive one but if you're getting into it because of that thrill, that sense of self-mastery, that sense of self-realization through beating the market, through seeing into the future, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it because they're the wrong kind of payoffs to be chasing.

54:45And that's where people can get into trouble, I think, if they're pursuing the excitement, the thrill, the self-gratification. Because when you pick something, it comes off, you make a big profit, that power of, I can see into the future. It's an economic payoff, but it's a non-economic payoff as well. And people can get hooked on that. I think it's very addictive. And if that's your thing, fine, but bet what you can afford to lose because it is a bet. It's not an investment. That's literally how I feel every day. Well, the single biggest event that brought more people to the market than anything was like GameStop.

55:17I saw within my channel, like I could stand there banging a drum going, you'll get 9 % a year every year on average. And that'll fluctuate. And if you do that for 30 years, look at how much money you got on people like, nah, forget that. But this short squeeze over here on a bank nearly bankrupt company that i'm throwing all my money into that so it was like those those emotions those powers are are powerful so people who are yeah disenfranchised people who feel excluded you know all those kind of non-financial payoffs there's you know it isn't just that they're in it to make money it's all the the kind of political you know it's revenge for the crash of 2008 as well it's kind of yeah sticking it to the hedge funds but those kinds of motivations, we can trace that back and seeing other outlets, other brokerages that have sold the same kind of ideas.

56:04It's a message of populism, which probably isn't going to go away. And you've seen that repeat throughout history at key times. Yeah. It's kind of really the origins of that one, not necessarily 300 years, but late 19th century with these outside brokerages, bucket shops. The language of that is very overtly populist and kind of very down on the stock exchange inside elites. And it's particularly strong in America where their politics are developing in interesting ways with growing concerns about the power of elites. And so these brokerages were really pushing this democratic populist kind of language that tied in with the politics of the time.

56:43We're standing up for the small man, the small guy. Like say 2008 might have been similar. People really turned on financial markets. People thought you're the reason that we're like this. You've ruined everything basically. How does the literature navigate those periods? Well, yeah, you would think with huge difficulty, but it's weird how they just kind of skate along the surface of it. You can highlight a few overt cases where so-called experts are making big statements in the autumn of 29, just before the crash saying, things are going to go up now is a great time to invest, like literally weeks before the crash.

57:19So it's kind of harder for people who've really stuck their neck out. But the broader genre of financial stock market advice flourishes through those years. Admittedly, there's a smaller market. A lot of people have lost a lot of money. So the stock market does shrink. It doesn't regain its pre-1929 levels until the 1950s. But the genre keeps going and that's when you get the real flourishing of fundamental analysis. Is it because their style failed us? They were wrong. We've got the answer now. Is it that? It's kind of a lot of it is, yeah, it's slightly more difficult for the technical analysts, the chartists to kind of get their way out of it, although they do.

58:00But in post-29 regulatory climate, where you get more and more data becoming available because disclosure requirements being placed on corporations for the first time, much more extensive. So there's so much more data and that really feeds into the growing trend of fundamental analysis, value investing, because you can crunch the numbers yourself now. All this data, which was private, is now publicly available. So that really provides a big boom to fundamental analysis and the idea that, well, we didn't have all these skills and all this knowledge before 29, but now we do. So, you know, again, this time it's different.

58:35We can approach investment in a much more scientific way. We won't get burned like people did in 29. That's a bit too message, isn't it? It's like, we've got the science now. They didn't before. Exactly, yeah. So there's always an angle. There's always a way, despite, you know, 1929 was huge. You know, like the market loses, was it 89 % of its value between 1929 and 32. You know, it's huge losses. Yeah, if that's a dip, I was like, I lost that last year in crypto. It was about 80 % dip drop. Yeah, but yeah, that's crazy. Man, you've got like so much money in there and it's just. Oh, yeah. And it's over how many years?

59:12Two or three years? Three years. So was it on average per year, like 25 % or how did it? Yeah, absolutely tanked. It just tanked though. There was some like traps in there as well. I think it rose like dead cat bouncers as they call them. And like people threw their money back in and even when it was dying, people were like, this is going to come back. And yeah, people caught falling knives and all those sorts of terms. It's just, yeah. People got into, you know, like 1930 saying, well, that was bad. but now's the time to buy it. And then they're the ones who lost it. It's going to step down. Have you, throughout your 300 years of research, have you ever seen anyone that's got the answer?

59:49Where you're like, this guy probably had it nailed. It's a good question. It's tempting to say yes, but I mean, it's, I mean, a lot of people have got a bit of the answer, but in kind of like trying to find the perfect solution, like the Holy Grail, it's probably a myth. It's probably, you know, that we're never going to find the surefire route to riches, but it's the quest for that, the quest for someone who figures it all out. That's what keeps people investing, keeps people reading, whether it's the manuals, which still exist, they're still flourishing as a genre. The internet hasn't killed them, but obviously the internet has increased the number of platforms.

1:00:27So it's still going. But if there is a holy grail, then it's kind of passive investment. That's the closest we've come to kind of, you know, figuring out, well, we can't beat the market, but maybe we don't have to. If you missed anything in that episode, don't worry. We do a really good summary of everything that's gone on and what we discussed in our newsletter. You can sign up using the link in the description. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. It really makes a difference and lets us know what we're doing right. This is not financial advice. The reason it's not financial advice is because it's not tailored to you.

1:00:59Like we say a lot on the podcast, investments can fall and rise. In fact, this is almost a guarantee. Remember, past performance is no guarantee of future results, so your money is always at risk with investing. Also, remember other fees may apply. I'm Damo. I'm T. This episode was recorded by Jack Hobbs. It was produced and edited by Ruth Edwards. Johnny Hunter is in charge of all our marketing, and it's all brought together by Will Stallman.