My wife and I stood at the foot of the mountain, faced with several paths to choose from. It wasn’t the pathway that mattered, but the destination. We decided on Passage Peak, a challenging climb with many steps.

There is an old stock market adage that states that every year one should “sell in May and go away”, not reinvesting in equities until November. This saying is based on the generally held principle that stocks rise more in the 6-month period from November to April than from May to October.

I've been writing lately about the volatility in financial markets. In this week's release of our Financial Markets Handbook, the narrative is not dissimilar.

Just like Melbourne weather, the stock and financial markets can and do change really quickly. Last week I talked about investor sentiment at multi-year highs, and the fact that professional money managers were allocating to stocks at the highest level since January 2022 - all coinciding with the most recent peak in the stock market. Ironic, no?

Most of us are terrible market forecasters. Even more of us won't admit it. Ego is a massive thing in life - let alone in the financial industry. I get it, I've been trying to dissolve mine for years. I attended a meditation retreat last year, it wasn't my first and won't be my last. During one process I purged my ego from my body. It was like nothing I have ever felt before. I did it. I completely dissolved my ego - amazing. I would continue to meditate and reflect for months following only to realise that it would take someone with an ego to convince himself he's dissolved his ego. And so, the journey of personal growth continues.

We've been hearing about it for a while now. By 2024, the commercial real estate market was supposed to crash and bring down the entire economy with it. Why hasn't the commercial real estate (CRE) market crashed? Maybe it already has, but you're looking in the wrong places. You see, CRE is not just office or construction. It's much more than this - it's residential, retail, industrial, storage, hotel, mixed use, land, healthcare, and so on - you get my flow. The problem with looking at the headline market is that it encapsulates everything I have just outlined above and more.