As I write this it’s the early afternoon of Tuesday the 13th of February 2018 and I’m sitting in Edinburgh airport waiting for a flight back to London City.

Everything seems to be going to plan with no planned delays. However last night there was a concern that an unexploded world war II bomb was found in the water near the airport I’m flying into.

I received the news from my wife Cassie, who told me what had happened, whilst walking through Edinburgh.

My immediate reaction was to panic. After all when we receive news which impact our plans it’s entirely natural to be a little perturbed.

However the feeling of panic soon passed. You see I knew that the airport would be prompt in fixing the problem and whilst it might have caused me some delays (it hasn’t yet…but there’s still time for this to change!) I’ll make it to my destination in the end.

Now I could have started to book train tickets, research alternative routes and panick about getting back to London by Wednesday. Instead I decided to spend the time enjoying Edinburgh with my wife (and the brilliant Scottish Gallery of Modern Art – which is well worth a visit!)

The stock markets are currently experiencing a bit of a roller coaster ride which could have a natural impact of making investors quite fearful. However the reality is that unless you need access to the money you’ve invested (either in ISA’s, pensions or something else) immediately the best thing to do is to continue not to take action.

However whilst I’ve been at the airport I’ve been catching up on the money section of one of the Sunday newspapers.

Although some of the commentary in this particular newspaper highlighted some really important topics investors should certainly focus on (i.e. the impact of charges on their investments which has a genuine impact on so many achieving their longer term goals…more people should check this!) the largest headline in the financial section was this:-

“THE RETURN OF FEAR!”

When I read it I couldn’t help but have a little chuckle at the melodrama of the headline (it seemed less ‘the game of achieving your financial goals’ and more ‘game of thrones’) but the article went on to explore the recent slump in the markets using frightening looking graphs and headlines.

As I’ve said before it’s natural to be a little perturbed by slumps in the market if you’re invested in the market but if you don’t need all of your funds immediately you should expect some ups and downs along the way.

When we sit with our clients we often talk about two things…

Firstly we talk about the fact that whilst planning is important, a financial plan assumes the world is an entirely predictable place and whilst we can discuss what might happen to derail the plan and mitigate this we also need to understand that there are some things we can’t control. Investment markets are one of them.

and

Secondly that when we meet our clients for our regular review there will be years when their investments might not   have done particularly ‘well’ due to the volatility of markets but why in good years and bad years we’ll recommend the same….’don’t worry about the newspapers tell you about ‘the return of fear’…the smart thing to do is not to panic.

You see unexpected things do happen unexploded bombs being found in the docks near London airports and ‘paper losses’ due to market corrections being among them…

…and whilst we can’t do anything about the former, we’re going to be telling our clients about the latter….

“We’ve already discussed that markets go up and markets go down, corrections happen and it’s scary when they do. However our job is to work with you to make smart financial decisions…and that often enough is to make no changes at all…trust us you’ll thank us when markets start to improve again as you won’t have consolidated all of the losses you made when the market slumped”

Our clients being smart people, and paying us to provide this level of reassurance and guidance, understand this and often enough don’t take any action at all when markets are particularly volatile.

You see our job as our clients trusted partner isn’t to achieve fantastic levels of growth on their money but to enable them to make smart financial decisions which get them closer to achieving their financial goals…

….regardless of the obstacles along the way.