The Savvy Investor

Who are these investors? Every time you turn on a business report you hear about investors losing confidence, investors not being attracted to one thing or another. Do you know any of these people? From the descriptions you would be inclined to think they are a slightly more glamorous version of professional gamblers, cocooned in a windowless room surrounded by banks of televisions tuned to Bloomberg, CNN and MSNBC, poring over the Wall Street Journal, the investor’s Racing Post. Or are they really normal people like you or me as we are led to believe? I don’t know any stockbrokers and nobody I know knows any stockbrokers. In what realm does all of this investing take place?

The supposed tragedy of the Anglo Irish debacle was that for every Sean Quinn there was a swathe of normal people who got burnt. By normal now I’m sure they didn’t mean carpenters, butchers and delivery drivers – the kind of people who help out with the under 10s at their local GAA club on a Saturday morning. No, by normal they meant people who live within earshot of Landsdowne Road. Or people who, from their living room, can see south across the bay all the way to Killiney, on a clear day.

You will never hear a financial expert on the radio try to decode the language he is speaking so that we can understand what he’s saying. Matt Cooper will occasionally ask them to unravel the meaning contained in a particularly gnarly sentence, but he’s the only one. These people like to wrap themselves in their own nonsensical incomprehensible dialect to give themselves cache, a certain detachment from Joe Public. Did you ever hear Neil Francis analyzing rugby on the radio on a Friday evening? Neil tries very hard to convey impression that his insights, no matter how cumbersome, irrational or half cocked represent the absolute, incontestable truth. He will sigh and do the radio equivalent of rolling his eyes when taken to task on a particularly errant prediction he has made. He considers himself the supreme rugby being and it is this conviction that keeps him where he is. If you act like you know what you’re on about, roughly half the population will buy it, and that’s enough.

The financial chaps are similar with their cloak and dagger language, the bullshit about corporate instruments, deleveraging and so on. This is all designed to shroud them with a mystique that is intended to blow normal peoples’ minds. The reason it is such a tight knit circle is that it is only physically possible to withstand the stench of bullshit emanating from a certain number of exponents at any one time. We need to confine these areas, to create a kind of bullshit quarantine, Dublin four is obviously the most famous of these compounds but there are others which are trying to claw their way into the premier league.

Ranelagh for example. The Raneligians are unusual in that they try to camouflage their intent in a bit of what used to be called street cred. They let on to be interested in what John Gormley says, they let on to have a bit of taste in music: Ray LaMontagne ticks all the boxes on this one- he’s got a beard, he says sod all, he appears to be in mortal pain all the time, his music is dreadfully dull but faintly profound, he’s perfect for the new age right winger. They eat noodles seven nights a week and can be seen heading down for the Sunday papers in sandals and khaki shorts from the first week in March onwards. Their place of work has a room that’s full of beanbags. Don’t let any of this mislead you though, these people are hardcore. They are investors. And they have their annual conference in one of those wigwams at the Electric Picnic.

The radio just told me that there are still plenty of worthwhile options out there for the savvy investor. Being an investor is one thing, being a savvy investor opens up a whole other frontier. Like Roy and Robbie they sound similar but are nothing but. Because any eejit can go to work, pay the bills, live life and enjoy it, save a bit, provide a decent home for themselves and their family and carry on in a low key, contented way. But who’d want to, when you can be an investor or, god bless us and save us, a savvy investor? “You see savvy comes from the French verb savoir, to know, you know, so this guy knows his stuff, he’s in the know, you know”

So the savvy investor apparently possesses a knowledge that is unattainable to the rest of us and the language that the savvy investor and his savvy investor friends use is designed to keep it that way. Thus we hear talk of Keynesian solutions, short options, hedging and all manner of delectable financial instruments.

Now having your own dialect is fine if the realm in which you operate is actually of some use to the wider world. Neuro surgeons for example speak a language entirely of their own making and we don’t have the slightest problem with it. We are prepared to forgive them this little indulgence in light of the fact that they are uniquely equipped to save lives as a matter of routine. Our investment manager friends have no such saving graces. Their language is an indulgence we are not prepared to tolerate in light of the fact that they are uniquely equipped to destroy lives as a matter of routine. Everyone’s lives, not just those of their savvy investor subjects.

We have no problem with seemingly meaningless jargon from people with genuine talent who had a calling and had to endure tortuous twenty hour day residency programmes to get where they are. However, if your career path began with a phone call from someone, a good friend of Charlie McCreevy’s, telling you where to sit and who to go for a few pints with, that’s a different story. You, my friend, can shut the feck up.