tactical trader

Here’s some advice for you: be careful when talking about your investments, especially when they’re doing well.

And what has prompted me to give this advice? The coup in Thailand.

While we don’t have any direct exposure to the Thai markets, we do have a number of Asian holdings in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Yesterday morning we were discussing how, over the last few months, they’ve all been doing very nicely, how they’d recovered following the dip in May, and how we were happy to continue holding them in the portfolio.

Then the Thai military decides to stage a coup while their President is out of the country – great! We all know how the financial markets love a bit of shock news. Although I’m certain they didn’t do this just to spite us (I’d have to be really paranoid to think that), their timing was perfect

Fortunately our holdings haven’t been badly affected with Japan down 0.98%, Korea up 0.78% and Taiwan up 1.16% at the time of writing. I just hope that things don’t destabilise in the country, that some crazed military leader doesn’t install himself as a dictator and that the markets don’t get too spooked by any future developments.

As for us, I think we’ll just keep quiet about the things that are going well, just in case…