Money and happiness: a lesson I learnt after 30 years in wealth management

I’VE been reflecting on almost 30 years of managing other people’s money, as well as my own, and have drawn some important lessons about our relationship with money. One big lesson: More money does not always lead to happiness. It was 1999, and I was early in my career. My most unconventional client uttered these words on Dec 28, 1999: “I’ve made enough. I will stop.”

He was 64, and had always been a different kind of investor. Every morning, he would ask me to fax him a list of stocks that had made new all-time highs the previous day. He would study the list, and then pick a few of them to buy. I remember thinking that this was the opposite of what most people did; most would wait for a pull-back before buying. If the pull-back did happen, my client would instead sell and take a small loss.

It was a one-sided relationship: I learned far more about investing from watching and talking to him than he got in return. I think I was his banker because he wanted someone young, without all the preconceived notions about how one should invest, and who wouldn’t sell him the latest investment idea of the day from the banks, which he always dismissed as noise.