Market Musings 300623:
Differing attitudes to Risk-Taking
Stock markets ignores European economic erosion
Summary:
Getting wealthy v staying wealthy
Why I am still not rushing to buy UK property yet
What interests me this week: surprising resilience of the Euro STOXX 50 index
Podcast: Does money make people happy?
In this podcast, Edmund Shing shares his thoughts about the correlation (or lack of) between money and happiness.
What is happiness, and can it be measured?
Which countries have the highest average scores of life satisfaction?
Are wealthy people happier than those who are not?
Do you have to earn a lot to be happy?
Different mentalities: Getting v Staying Wealthy
In my everyday work, I come across a great number of wealthy and very wealthy individuals and families.
When we look at the origins of this wealth, it is sometimes inherited and has occasionally been passed down through generations of the same family.
But more often, it has been built up by an entrepreneur or someone who has risen to or close to the top in a big, successful company and has built their wealth over years.
Entrepreneurs are risk takers by nature: In the case of entrepreneurs and company founders, they have usually had to take great personal and financial risks in order to get their businesses off the ground, combined with huge determination and an awful lot of hard work.
So to become a successful founder and business owner, one generally takes great business and financial risks. So successful entrepreneurs tend to be by nature risk-takers, or else they would never have embarked on such a perilous business journey in the first place.
I can see this in a small way with my own parents, who arrived in the UK in the 1960s from overseas with little to their name and no further education qualifications, but steadily worked hard and built up a series of businesses in the catering industry (restaurant, bar, cafe hotel) over years in order to build up their current comfortable financial state.
Initially, they had to build up their savings by working very hard including overtime in order to open their own small restaurant, of course borrowing money from the bank to supplement their own starting capital.…
