Here's our friend Mister (not captain) Kirk at FT, the guy who famously holds 100% cash in his public FT portfolio, and keeps telling us about investments. (That old Nassim Taleb quote about skin-in-the-game, and showing us what you invest, comes to mind)

Nothing really matters, he seems to suggest in this weekend's piece.

Actually, geopolitics, interest rates, elections, taxes etc... Nothing stops this train, and you can't carve out meaning from any of these events (#1468578)

I’ve spent decades arguing that not much matters for investors. So what does, eh? I’ve been pondering this again recently as another war comes and goes without huge repercussions for returns. Sure, oil traders have wet themselves. But for the rest of us — so far — it’s the same downy uppity as ever.

in previous columns I’ve shown that geopolitics can mostly be ignored when it comes to asset prices. Likewise, interest rates, tax regimes, governance and whether your favourite colour is blue or green. Most of this was known to me before I started as a portfolio manager three decades ago. The historical data is unequivocal. Looking back now though, it still amazes me how little the events we were freaking out about at the time actually changed anything.

Oooh, I do like this. Confession: Den is partial-af to stuff like this. Not even the GFC or eurocrisis were interesting:

The Asian and Russian crises in the late 1990s barely distracted us from the money we were making in dotcom stocks. The lifts didn’t stop working at midnight on December 31 1999, either. When the crash eventually came, it was over in 24 months. The financial crisis was even shorter. All but $30bn of the troubled asset relief programme money — some $440bn — has now been paid back. US banks will report bumper profits (and bonuses) next week. Plus ça change.

NOOOO-THIIIING stops this financial-returns train, ok:

It’s not only the Brexits, tariffs and Ukraines that fail to smother returns, as we thought they might. Sky-high valuations don’t seem to bother investors either. Nor do extreme equity concentrations, autocracies as trading partners, or any of the supposed “megatrends” such as demographics or climate.

"is there anything over my career that has had a meaningful effect on investment returns?""is there anything over my career that has had a meaningful effect on investment returns?"

1. China's admission into WTO in 2001.
nobody got it right and nobody saw it coming and obvs nobody could invest seeing what the 2020s would be accordingly but still.

Thanks to easily the biggest consumption of natural resources in history, the country of my birth [Australia] has been rolling in money ever since. At its peak, China accounted for half the world’s copper, aluminium, cement and iron ore consumption.

2. Covid...ugh
The policy reactions to this one made, if anything, the train situation sooo much worse:

Unlike the above, however, in some respects it’s too soon to tell. The worst repercussions are still to come. We know governments took on huge levels of debt during the pandemic. Some vital, much squandered. Few politicians recite the spending numbers today. They are too big to swallow. Some $5tn of Covid relief funding in the US was more than 10 times gross disbursements from the financial crisis.
The low single-digit billions spent per day in Iran or on the Artemis II mission are irrelevant in comparison. In many western countries, unsustainable net debt to output ratios would be around a fifth lower if it wasn’t for the pandemic.

"So yes, two things have mattered over my investment career so far. I’m not sure I have the nerves to handle a third right now.""So yes, two things have mattered over my investment career so far. I’m not sure I have the nerves to handle a third right now."

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