This article, by Justin Baiocchi, was originally published in The Northern Daily Leader on 10 September 2017.

Before I became a parent I had very little knowledge or experience of small people. I knew they came with sleepless nights and a much-reduced bank balance for example, but that was about as far as my familiarity stretched. I had no idea, for instance, that they are incredibly easy to fool. My current favourite trick to play on the kids is to move their toys around when they’re asleep at night. In the morning, they might inexplicably find Kate’s ballerina Barbie doll hanging off a ceiling light fitting, along with one of Jack’s Star Wars figurines. Or Jack’s teddy, Jerry the Giraffe, might be found having a tea party with Kate’s Pooh Bear on top of the lounge curtain rail. It always prompts much conjecture about how they got there (did they fly?), what they’re doing and how they’re going to get down. Sometimes I’ll forget to move the toys on to a new location, sparking much speculation about whether they’re asleep or why they haven’t moved for a week. This serves as a timely prompt for me to relocate the toys to a more exotic spot – hanging precariously from the smoke alarm for instance. When the toys get spotted in their new location, we’re eagerly summonsed to come and view this startling finding for ourselves. I always shake my head in wonderment and solemnly proclaim it must be magic. This unbelievable revelation is, of course, accepted without question. From Jack and Kate’s perspective, we must surely have one of the most magical houses in the world.

Unfortunately, when it comes to investing and managing your finances, there is no magic. There’s no fairy dust to sprinkle over your investments; no ‘secret sauce’ to making money; no conjuring tricks to grow your bank balance overnight. Sometimes people think that they must be missing out on something; that there’s some easy step to making money which they just haven’t yet heard about. I have bad news for those people – there’s no such thing. And don’t mistake complexity for magic: in my experience more complexity usually means greater costs, not greater returns. Just because you can’t understand how an investment works, doesn’t mean it’s magical, in fact it’s more likely to be improbable. There really are no shortcuts to wealth, short of winning the lottery, and for most people the odds of that happening are about as likely as catching sight of Jack and Kate’s toys as they fly from one picnic spot to another each night