Five new year resolutions for investors

Market forecasts are silly, but it's worth making them anyway, says fund manager and Behavioural Investment blogger Joe Wiggins. Write down your 2020 forecasts and review them in 12 months' time. Do this annually so you don't get carried away by a few lucky predictions.

This will “disabuse any notions of prescience” and provide a “cold dose of reality”, says Wiggins.

He also recommends investors keep a decision log; we forget things and rewrite history, so it’s “almost impossible” to learn from mistakes unless we have a record of what we were thinking at the time we made a decision. They’re two of five behavioural resolutions for 2020 suggested by Wiggins. The others?

Check your portfolio less frequently;

Japan pension fund wrong to target short sellers

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Stocktake: ‘Too much, too soon’ for $2tn Saudi Aramco

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Paul Volcker will be missed

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Time for a Santa Claus rally?

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Read something you disagree with each week, and;

Be comfortable doing nothing.

Investors “are expected to constantly react” to market developments, says Wiggins; resisting that impulse and doing nothing “requires a great deal of effort”.