Looking back over my five and a half decades exploring investment and finance, I have to ask the inevitable question: what have I learned from it all?

The period has been marked by a welter of financial innovation, regulatory change, booms and busts, banking crises, geopolitical tension and much else besides. From this protracted drama it is hard to extract a set of simple coherent lessons for investors. Yet I believe that there are some eternal verities in investment and finance. They are often counterintuitive and not always aligned with conventional economic wisdom.

My early education in investment started in the great bull market of the late 1960s, in which a heady pace was set by the so-called Nifty Fifty growth stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. In the brief period I spent in the City of London, becoming a chartered accountant, I had the good fortune to be sent on the audit of the Imperial Tobacco pension fund. This was run by one of the great investment gurus of the postwar period, the actuary George Ross Goobey.