One Good Call?
Mark Crothers | Apr 14, 2026
We recently had another meeting with my wife's financial advisor. At our previous meeting I'd been fairly open about my opinion that he hadn't delivered meaningful investment gains compared to my own self-managed Vanguard portfolio, and at considerably higher fees. I suspect he wasn't thrilled about that. He came prepared. He presented a multi-sheet analysis of how his firm had managed my wife's investments in the lead-up to the 2022 bond crash: aggressively de-risking into ultra-short duration bonds and cash-like instruments, alongside a pivot into commodities. It was clearly designed to make a point. And to give credit where it's due, the preemptive bond pivot worked a treat. What I hadn't fully appreciated was that this wasn't a one-shot defensive call. The firm subsequently rotated back into short and medium duration bonds at an opportune moment, catching most of the subsequent rally from an already positive position — a position only achievable because they'd avoided the crash in the first place. A passive 60/40 investor meanwhile took the full 13% drawdown on their bond sleeve and has only nominally recovered that ground three years later. When I pushed back on fees, his response was disarmingly straightforward: they only need to make that level of macro call once a decade to justify a significant portion of the cost. When I worked through the arithmetic on a portfolio of meaningful size, it's hard to entirely disagree. Protecting and then capitalising on a dislocation of that magnitude can represent many years of fee differential in a single cycle. Worth noting: the ground had already shifted before he opened his laptop. At our previous meeting I'd secured a meaningful fee reduction and a more joined-up view of our combined accounts, he now has to advise with my Vanguard holdings firmly in the frame. His…
Read more » Cash: The False Prophet
Mark Crothers | Oct 29, 2025
When I was growing up in a loving but economically stretched household, birthdays and Christmas presents were nice. But what really rang my bell was a gift of cash. These sometimes materialised when an aunt or uncle couldn't think of anything better. As a kid those crisp notes were full of potential, self-directed treats, a true treasure. My parents were exclusively a cash using family; if there was ever any excess it ended up in a bank savings account or credit union. I followed this path during my first seasonal job as a young teenager, potato picking and hay and straw baling when required on a local farm. Taking my savings book to the teller and getting the interest marked up was a nice experience, but it didn't take long for me to wonder if it was possible to earn more than the pittance added to my balance. That pittance of interest felt good until I thought deeper. Inflation was running near 12% at the time and I was earning 10% on my savings book. Even at that age I figured out I was losing money. Every time I held those crisp notes, I was no longer seeing "potential" or "treasure"; I was seeing reduced value. The prophet hadn't just stopped giving; it was now actively taking. This made me look for a different solution. Luck stepped in with the solution to my dilemma. Around that time, the UK government began aggressively selling off public utilities, with British Telecom being one of the largest. The popular campaign, urging ordinary citizens to buy shares, made this feel different from the quiet credit union. With the money earned, I took the plunge and bought shares in the BT IPO. Suddenly, my cash wasn't passively decaying; it was transformed into capital that grew…
Read more » Pedaling Away From Tightness
Mark Crothers | Jul 25, 2025
Yesterday evening, I decided to test out my brand-new, shiny bike. Around half an hour later, I was standing bemused, looking down the 20% gradient hill path I'd just cycled up. I was just a bit out of breath, and if you know anything about cycling and gradients, you must be thinking I'm talking rubbish. That steep slope should literally be a wall of unendurable pain, and on my normal bike, I wouldn't even have attempted to go near it. How could I have possibly done this extreme feat? Very simple: my shiny new purchase is an e-bike, and what a revelation it's been. I love cycling and probably ride around 1,000 miles per year on my normal bike. But I have to tell you, it's a challenge at my holiday home because there's a lot of hilly terrain to conquer. My dream of biking the wonderful coastal routes around my home over this summer was in serious jeopardy of not happening, or being curtailed to the easier routes. I'm normally a very generous person, but when it comes to personal spending on myself, it's another story entirely. Tight is the word that comes to mind, and adding extremely to the beginning of that wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination. But after weeks of indecision and hours of looking, I eventually cracked open the wallet and spent a bit of cash on myself, much to the very large sigh of relief from my wife, Suzie, because I'd talked her ears off about my buying dilemma. So on the face of it this hasn't a lot to do with finance and retirement, and in truth it doesn't. I just wanted to tell people what a great thing this e-bike is, but if I dig down a bit deeper, there are…
Read more » Sector Fund by Stealth
Mark Crothers | Mar 7, 2026
I'VE RECENTLY MADE the most significant change to my own portfolio in thirty five years. For the first time I've moved away from pure market-cap investing, tilting meaningfully toward Europe and Southeast Asia and bringing my US technology concentration down to around fifteen percent. I'm retired. I don't need to chase the outperformance that concentration might deliver, and I don't need the potential volatility that comes with it. This is a personal position rather than any kind of recommendation; it's nothing more than a risk management decision made at a point in life where I simply don't need the risk. What prompted it was a growing discomfort with something I suspect many everyday investors haven't fully reckoned with: the S&P 500 is no longer quite the animal it once was. A broad market index fund casts a wide net across the economy, and the S&P 500, which tracks the 500 largest US businesses by market value, has long been held up as the sensible default: low cost, well diversified, a bet on the whole rather than any one part of it. A sector fund works differently; it makes a deliberate, concentrated bet on a specific industry. If you believe technology is going to outperform the market as a whole, it gives you the ability to concentrate your capital into exactly the sector your research or gut instinct suspects is going to be the place to be and let it run. The theory behind each is straightforward enough. A broad market fund captures a larger slice of the investment universe and is generally considered the lower-risk path. A sector fund comes with a well-understood trade-off: higher potential returns in good times, sharper drawdowns when sentiment turns. Investors who consciously choose a technology sector fund know what they're signing up for. The…
Read more » My New Zero-Wage CEO Role
Mark Crothers | Sep 1, 2025
This morning, as I was drinking my coffee, I realized it was September 1st. Today, with the kids returning to school in Ireland, grandparents across the country will be taking on after-school care duties. This got me thinking. Just after I retired and before heading to my vacation home, I had an eight-week window into one aspect of my retirement future: helping out a couple of days per week minding the grandkids. This was a new and unique adventure that I'm looking forward to resuming in late September. My initial impressions of this new responsibility have been enlightening. Although my grandson spent part of the summer with us, entertaining him one-on-one is a different kettle of fish. I've discovered that school drop-off is a dog-eat-dog world, where you jostle for the perfect parking space. It’s highly exciting when you spot a place right at the school gate, with envious "yummy mummies" looking on in anger. Very satisfying, and worth missing that second coffee. Then there's soccer at the local park after school. I’m positioned in the goal while my grandson kicks the ball at me as hard as he can, seeking the perfect goal. It hurts when the ball hits me right in the leg! I've had ball-shaped bruises to prove it. Quickly moving on from this indignity, we come to his favorite Xbox video game, Fortnite. I've mastered the basics but keep getting killed within minutes. I’m going to need a refresher course in September. My grandson thinks I'm a bit rubbish at it, but my goal is to last a bit longer before getting laughed at. Then we have my younger granddaughter. She’s not yet experienced the joys of school but loves trying to shove plastic cups into my mouth while making me dinner with her toy kitchen.…
Read more » Risk Adjusted: The Family Ledger
Mark Crothers | Jun 18, 2026
Most investors understand risk-adjusted return. I'm guessing few apply it to the way they earn the money in the first place. That gap, between what you made and what it actually cost to make it, is where some of the most important financial decisions of a life get made without anyone really noticing. Take my friend as an example. He's lived a remarkably colourful life. He served in the UK equivalent of Force Recon: small teams, hostile borders, operating deep in-theatre alongside special forces. On one occasion, after going more than a month past his scheduled check-in, his wife was formally notified that he was missing in action. To call that a strain on family life would be a significant understatement. He eventually moved into civilian work as a personal protection contractor, escorting United Nations personnel through war-torn parts of the world. The risk profile hadn't changed much. The paycheck had changed enormously. After a few years he had built a small portfolio of rental properties and accumulated a healthy net worth. The gross returns, by any conventional measure, looked excellent. Once a year he and his wife, a teacher with her own career, would sit down to review their finances together. By his own admission, he was deeply pleased with where life had taken them. Perhaps even a little smug. At the end of one of these reviews he turned to his wife and asked almost as an afterthought: are you happy with everything? The answer surprised him. No. She wasn't unhappy with the portfolio. She was unhappy with the mental toll extracted to build it. The returns had been strong. The personal volatility had been brutal and cumulative, extracting a cost that never once appeared on the spreadsheet. The lifestyle was comfortable. It just wasn't worth what it…
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