The first is that to make money in the stock market you actually have to do something. Fortune favours the brave.
When I got back from a week’s break in Portugal at the end of February, the market was in freefall. In the first two weeks of March I made three investments into a FTSE 100 tracker.
I wish I’d chosen the S&P 500, but there you go. The best-timed of the three is up 25 per cent. All I knew was that, after a brutal fall, the odds were improving by the day.
A related lesson is that this investment was only possible because I had cash in my portfolio. Always have some dry powder.
2. The market is not the economy
The second lesson is that stock markets and economies are not the same thing. Stock markets look to the future, economies operate in real time, while economic data reflect the past.
By the time we learnt the second quarter had experienced the worst recorded drop in GDP, the stock market had long moved on to anticipate the expected recovery.
The V-shape of the recovery in markets is what made that March investment such a fleeting opportunity.
3. Obvious doesn’t mean wrong
Third, sometimes the obvious investment conclusion is the right one. If you had decided early in the pandemic that video conferencing and home delivery would outperform bricks and mortar retail, airlines and restaurants, you would not have been thinking very far outside the box.
That was the consensus. But it would have made you money in the stock market as the divergence in performance continued long after this had become accepted wisdom.
4. If you see a bandwagon, it’s too late
The fourth lesson is usually ascribed to financier Jimmy Goldsmith. He said: “If you see a bandwagon, it’s too late.”
I was reminded of this towards the end of November when the articles about the best-ever month in the market started to appear. By the time the dust had settled on the US election, the mood music on Brexit had improved and we’d understood the news emerging from the vaccine labs, the market was 15 per cent higher.
5. Existing trends accelerated
Fifth, most of the time things stay the same but just occasionally it really is a watershed. Everyone thought that the financial crisis would change everything, but we soon got back to doing things exactly as we had before.
One of this year’s big changes is just an acceleration of existing trends towards a more socially isolated, online existence. Another change feels like a more significant break with the past.
The shift from austerity to intervention, and the inflation it will bring in its wake, may be what we come to remember as the main consequence of the Trump/Brexit/pandemic period.
6. Share prices tell us something
The sixth lesson is that share prices tell us something important about what the world needs.
The performance of Tesla, Moderna and Airbnb is indicating that the planet will be better off with more renewable transport, a coronavirus vaccine and a more rational use of its already ample stock of bedrooms. It is saying we need more well-run and sustainable businesses.
The market being what it is, it will overshoot. Investors will inflate a bubble in sustainability, or ESG. In due course, it will burst – but not before it has told us something important about the world we live in and will hand on.
7. It will pass
And the final lesson from 2020? This too shall pass. Things are rarely as good as we hope or as bad as we fear.
The stock market’s determination to look through today’s manifold uncertainties to better times ahead is worth hanging on to at the end of a grim year.
Here’s to a happier 2021.
Tom Stevenson is an investment director at Fidelity International. The views are his own.
The Telegraph London