What does decades of investing through market booms, crashes and uncertainty teach you?

Well, I'm really interested in just finding out some more about your thoughts here based on the experience that you've had.

We talk about 20 years with Merchants Trust.

In fact, it's 30 years for you, a little bit more in the markets themselves.

I guess the first point I'd like to discuss with you is what does that actually teach you? How does it help you do better in your day-to-day

work? Experience gives you perspective in the market and I think humility.

I mean, there are lots of things we can't ever know and we can't know with certainty.

But experience teaches you to recognise certain patterns of behaviour, certain patterns in the market and certain events.

So things never... recur exactly the same.

But as they say, history rhymes.

So you get to see familiar patterns in markets and you get to see and learn how you yourself deal with that in the behavioural response.

So I think experience is enormously useful, but it certainly doesn't teach you everything.

It teaches you humility above everything else, actually, I think.

And when you look back over those 20, those 30 years, talk to me about some of the major events and how they've shaped your approach to what you do now.

Well, in the last 20 years, we've had the great financial crisis followed by austerity.

We've had the COVID pandemic we had in the UK, Brexit.

We've had the Ukraine invasion and so on.

So there's been an enormous number of shocks to the system, really quite major events, many of which were quite unpredictable from the outside.

And so we've seen enormous variety of environments, I suppose, in the last 20 years.

Do any of them hold anything in common when it comes to the way you need to approach the markets and the stocks that you choose to invest in?

Well, very often what you see is a narrative that develops or a theme that develops and the market or the stock market sort of goes in one direction and there's almost like an overwhelming drive in that direction.

And that can lead to over exuberance or, you know, Or over-pessimism sometimes.

In the financial crisis, there was far too much pessimism, actually, by the time you get to March 2009.

Really, I think what you see is periods of over-exuberance and also panic, I suppose, on the other end of it.

And those can create great opportunities for disciplined investors who can take advantage of those cycles.