So here it is, they say, Merry Christmas. The lights are already on, the Christmas cards have been in the shops for months and everyone thinks it’s Christmas time in a few weeks – but they’re so wrong!
Christmas doesn’t happen in December. Good gracious, no. Anyone in the know realises that not true – proper Christmas happens in July. Oh, yes. Christmas according to the gospel of Jasmine happens in July, has done for a few years now and is a big tradition with the cognoscenti.
Christmas dinner, with all the trimmings – apart from turkey because it’s a nuisance to get and nobody likes it anyway – is what is served chez Jasmine in the middle of summer every year with presents, a Christmas quiz and prizes for the best seasonal costume. Why? Because it’s a laugh and it’s different, and I like to be different always which is why right now I’m wearing a wetsuit under my tutu, and Doc Martens.
I can’t stand doing things just because everyone else is doing them. Christmas in December (which I reluctantly celebrate) is mostly an irritant with its enforced jollity, over-spending, over-eating and the mass pretence that we like our relatives, all done in the name of tradition. It’s the same with Valentine’s Day. Last year, I did a Halloween party on 14 February, partly because it’s different and partly because frankly when you’re single, Valentine’s Day might as well be Halloween for all the horror it engenders.
Being different certainly reaps financial rewards too. In July, as I have found, you can get cheap Christmas bits and pieces on eBay because no one else is looking for them and it also means my Christmas decorations get a second airing each year – making them even better value.
There’s plenty of money to be saved by doing other winter things in the summer such as changing your boiler and getting the pipes lagged. But the biggest financial rewards are in contrarian investing. As my hero, Warren Buffett, says, we should be “fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful” (I should see if he wants to come round for Christmas dinner next summer).
As any businessperson or seasoned investor will tell you, the best way to make money is to buy low and sell high. The best way to do that is to follow Warren’s advice and go against the crowd.
But what do human beings normally do? What we do is we buy when everyone else is buying – when the price is at its highest – then sell when the bubble has burst and the investment is on its knees. Then we give up on investing as a bad job generally and instead put our money into long-term losers such as savings accounts and Premium Bonds. You would think we would have learnt our lesson by now, in this age of the individual. But no, far from thinking more for ourselves as we lurch further into the 21st century, we’re blindly following the crowd more and proudly boasting of it.
James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds – a direct rebuttal to Charles Mackay’s 19th-century work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – insists that the crowd mentality is smarter than the individual. It’s certainly the way the internet works and is the basis for the thinking behind Blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology, which is central to the workings of cryptocurrencies. But will it really do us good long term? Shakespeare – a despiser of crowds – would say no. He would be horrified that we are imputing such wisdom to “the blind monster with uncounted heads, the still discordant, wavering multitude”. As would Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon who counselled, in his An Essay on Translated Verse: “…Yet be not blindly guided by the throng; The multitude is always in the wrong.”
Nowadays no one seems willing to do anything unless a majority of their followers approves of it on social media. I know a guy who ditched a new girlfriend because photos of them together didn’t get enough ‘likes’ from his online ‘friends’.
No, to be lucky in love, investing and life, we need to prick the bubble of popular delusions, purge our ‘friends’ on Facebook, invest in products that others think are boring or scary, and never, ever, dress like a Kardashian.
So be different, be unfashionable, be unpopular. It’s what all the cool kids are doing and it’s the only sure way to make money and feel smug as you count your evergrowing piles of cash.
Jasmine Birtles is a financial journalist and founder of MoneyMagpie.com. Email her at columnists@moneywise.co.uk.
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