Focus on long-term returns, not your feelings, when the markets start messing about. If you’ve checked your investment balance recently and felt a small urge to do something, you’re not alone. Markets wobble, headlines scream and suddenly switching funds or moving to “something safer” feels responsible, even grown-up.
However, the latest Momentum Investments’ Sci-Fi Report 2025 suggests the opposite is often true. Looking at investor behaviour over the past year, the report shows that many South Africans quietly paid a “behaviour tax” by reacting emotionally to market moves. Not through fees.
Not through bad products. Through perfectly human decisions, made at exactly the wrong time. Paul Nixon, head of behavioural finance at Momentum Investments, compared the period from September 2023 until September 2024 with April 2025 and saw that switches increased 130% because of the market’s antics.
Read Full Article on Daily Maverick
[paywall]
At the time, there was also an inflow of well over a billion rand into the Momentum Money Market. Nixon calculated that clients who switched then would have lost yearly growth of more than 10%. But one must also consider how well the All-share index (Alsi) of the JSE has grown since then, and the loss would have been far larger.
Nixon’s research further shows that anxious investors and those trying to read and time the market lost out the most. So what’s the practical move you can use to keep your money growing optimally? Before making any big investment change, introduce a 48-hour pause.
No switching, no withdrawing, no dramatic emails to your adviser. If it still feels sensible after two sleeps and one market-free walk, then revisit it. Your money doesn’t need you to be brave, clever or fast.
It mostly needs you to be boring and consistent, which is deeply unfashionable but remarkably effective. And if you’re feeling twitchy about markets right now, that’s okay too. Just don’t let a moment of discomfort become a long-term financial souvenir.
[/paywall]
