Investing is simple, not easy

August is Money Month, an initiative run by Te Ara Ahunga Ora (the Retirement Commission) to help improve financial wellbeing.

With that in mind, I thought I’d let aspiring share investors in on a secret, which is that it’s much easier than people think.

In fact, if you follow two simple rules it’s hard to go wrong.

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One is to be well-diversified, and the other is to focus on the long-term without letting the present day push you off course.

The first bit is easy.

Any decent adviser will drum diversification into you from the beginning, and if you’re a smaller investor there are index funds that make this easy to do.

Those with more capital have the luxury of using a combination of funds and direct shares, allowing them to tailor a portfolio more specifically to their needs.

That could mean dialling up the income generation, targeting parts of the market that offer better growth, or aligning a portfolio with sustainability goals.

The main thing is to spread your risk and cover your bases, rather than being too concentrated.

In 2022 the energy sector surged while technology slumped 29 per cent, but this year tech stocks have rebounded 46 per cent and energy has been one of the weakest sectors with a small decline.

Unless you’re good enough to pick next year’s winners and losers, you’re better to play it safe and hold a bit of everything.

The second piece of advice can be harder to follow.

Keeping your eye on the long game is difficult, especially during periods of uncertainty (which come frequently).

However, it’s non-negotiable and if you don’t feel you can stick it out for at least five (if not ten) years, the sharemarket isn’t the right place for your money.

The thing with financial markets is that the further ahead in you look, the more predictable things become.

Since 1945, the annual return (including reinvested dividends) from US shares has been 11.2 per cent, and the market has been up in 60 of those 78 years.

That’s an impressive return and a solid hit rate over eight decades, although the short-term variations have been significant.

The strongest gain in a 12-month period was 60 per cent (that came in 1983), while the biggest decline was 43 per cent (during the GFC in 2008 and 2009).

Things look a lot less scary if we group them into 10-year holding periods.

The proportion of positive returns jumps to 97 per cent, while the range of best and worst per annum performances narrows to 20.8 per cent and -3.4 per cent.

Move to rolling 20-year blocks, and this share investing gig starts to look straightforward.

US shares have delivered positive returns 100 per cent of the time, the best per annum return over a 20-year period is 17.9 per cent and the lowest 4.8 per cent.

The results are similar for New Zealand shares.

Looking at quarterly returns for our headline sharemarket indices going back to the 1960s, there’s never been a 10-year period where the market has been down.

That’s the secret.

If you’re well-diversified and you maintain a sensible investment time horizon, your chances of success will increase dramatically.

Markets are impossible to predict over days, months or even years, but the returns you’ll get and the volatility you’ll need to tolerate to achieve them become much better the longer you stick around.

A well-constructed share portfolio will just about always perform well over the long-term. The hard bit is keeping that in mind when there is a long list of things to worry about in the here and now (which is most of the time).

It’s simple, but I never said it was easy.

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