6. Stick to your investment plan | 10 tips to take care of your future, while you’re taking care of business

There’s a reason our motto is Stick With The Plan. Once you’ve got a planned track, deviation from it will only lengthen and complicate the journey.

“What makes the bias particularly pernicious is that we all recognise this bias in others but not in ourselves.” – Richard H. Thaler

Behavioural biases

Spotting the presence of bias in what other people do is a lot easier than spotting it in our own decisions, because it’s easier to look outward than to look inward.

It’s a bit like sitting in a traffic jam and complaining that you’re ‘stuck in traffic’. You’re not ‘in traffic’ you ‘are traffic’ and in the same way, when we see people making clear errors of judgment, it’s frustrating to be told we’re every bit as prone to those same lapses.

But we are. If you’re human, then you have behavioural biases wired into your very being. They’re the subconscious learnings that allowed a long, unbroken chain of surviving ancestors to lead right up to you, but when it comes to decisions about money they’re a real pain. We wrote a study that looks into all 17 known behavioural biases and how they cause you to do things that on paper seem irrational.

Unpicking patterns

Our behavioural biases influence how and where we invest in the first place and how we treat those investments in response to stimuli from the markets. For example, a downturn in the market can be frightening (or thrilling, depending on who you are) and cause us to shed perfectly good investments or load up on investments that aren’t a good long-term choice. Biases cause us to spot patterns that aren’t there, to miss those that are, and worst of all, they can bully us into deviating from the plan we’ve spent so much time and effort setting out for ourselves.

It’s in those times that it’s most important of all to stick with the plan. We’ll tell you this at the beginning and we’ll keep on telling you it, especially when you need to hear it most. Your plan is designed to get you where you’re going, no matter what’s happening around it.

Let us guide you

Over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing ten tips to taking care of your future, so that you can focus on taking care of your business safe in the knowledge that it’s all under control.

If you can’t wait and want to get your hands on the guide in full now, you can download it for free here.

But let’s talk about you

We’d love to start that conversation with you, so why not set up a face-to-face meeting today?

There’s no commitment, it doesn’t cost anything to talk through your plans with us and we’ll always be honest – we’ll only get involved if you and Metis Ireland are a clear match, and where we all agree we can add real value to your life.