Force for thought — 18.10.24

To Have and To Hold

How do you hold onto a good thing and not let it go before it has time to work its magic? By mobilising a method that works. No one is insulated from the challenges of sticking with something promising — not a diet, nor an exercise regimen, or even a first date — the moment it becomes uncomfortable and hard. Why should investing be any different?

We’ve collected more than four million data points that demonstrate how a particular methodological communication enables investors to hold on for the ride. The proof stretches beyond investing: our ability to hold on when we least want to — in order to withstand things that can cause our undoing — has application everywhere. Each week, we’ll show how and why a mechanism for holding on, in investing and in life, is so powerful.

Zooming in

Have you heard of Émile Coué? His is an incredible story — and one worth ingraining in our minds. Born in 1857, Coué trained as a pharmacist and earned a degree in pharmacology, eventually going on to work in an apothecary. There, he had an epiphany while interacting with his patients: if Coué helped them to expect to recover — which he did by emphasising the efficacy of the medicines he prescribed — his patients responded better to their medication. Thus developed his habit of attaching positive notes to the medications he prescribed; a methodology we know today as positive affirmations, originally coined by Coué as optimistic autosuggestions designed to condition his patients to believe they would get better. Eventually, this led Coué to synthesise his learnings in the Law of Concentrated Attention. That is, simply put, that wherever attention is focused repeatedly, it tends to realise itself.

What can we learn from Coué? First and foremost: Coué understood that in matters of medicine, like money, the stakes are high — and so are the accompanying sensitivities of those involved. Health and wealth are not trivial matters. But neither, Coué understood, is the lens through which we perceive them. This finding is profound. Most of us gloss over the perspectives we ourselves prescribe to our experiences without considering how these impact our outcomes, but they do, in exceptional ways. Like Coué demonstrated with his patients, where our attention goes, grows. So, what happens when we apple the same conditioning to our investment approach in an uber-high stakes environment like the stock market? We maximise the likelihood of generating investor outcomes by mobilising what matters and tuning out the rest. Given a template of conditioning — like Force500’s feedback system — that shifts focus towards productive, proactive and recurring reinforcement, investors can stay on track and close the gap between their desires at the outset of their investment journeys and their outcomes.

To Have on Hand

We rarely give our feelings their due attention, which is baffling given they play a key role in our financial decision-making. If we could function like robots — eliminating our emotions from our investing — we’d all be filthy rich. Until then, Liz Fosslein’s illustration cleverly captures why feelings should always be acknowledged in investing or otherwise, so we can learn to live with, and understand that, what may seem monumental today could be insignificant tomorrow.