The right thing for investors to do in 2023 was to ignore the worrywart consensus huggers (myself included) and leap with both feet in to a heady portfolio of the zingiest stocks. You only live once.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but still, such a strategy would have delivered remarkable gains. The Nasdaq Composite index of techy stocks jumped nearly 40 per cent in the year, 20 percentage points more than on the US benchmark S&P 500. The gap was even wider with the broad market trend in Europe, particularly the UK which trotted along in its customary position at the back of the pack.
Instead, pretty much everyone, from retail investors to big institutions, feared a recession in the US and caught a serious case of the heebeejeebies. Most tucked a large slice of funds away in cash: not the physical kind stuffed under a mattress but easy-access pots of money like interest-paying deposits, money market funds, short-term government debt and the like.