One of the reasons this moment in history is such a headfake for investors is that it demands they do opposite things at the same time. They need to shut out the noise but also listen to it carefully, ignore it but also take some pretty radical action.
The case for shoving cotton wool in your ears and refusing to watch The Donald Trump Show, now in its spectacular second series with zany new scriptwriters, is simple. It’s exhausting, for one thing. But for money managers, it’s also largely pointless.
In a week that has seen potential US military action against humble Greenland first floated, then seemingly withdrawn, the US stock market has done, well, not a lot really. It fell at the start of the week, fairly hard in fact — the S&P 500 index shed 2 per cent or so on Tuesday (Monday was a holiday in the US), marking the worst day since October. By the end of the week, however, we were back where we started, in the markets at least. So on a short-term basis, the correct course of action was: do nothing.