This article, by Justin Baiocchi, was originally published in The Northern Daily Leader on 5 November 2016.

Recently our daughter, Kate, turned 4. Or at least, that’s what my wife tells me. I was convinced it was actually her 14th birthday, but apparently I’m simply overdramatising what it’s like to have a 4 year old daughter who thinks stubbornness is an endearing personality trait. On the other hand, friends with older children warn me that the toddler years have nothing on the teenage years, a scary thought which already has my hairline receding at breakneck speed. Anyway, it was her birthday and it was my job to assemble her present. This year we had decided to reinforce gender stereotypes by giving her a toddler-sized kitchen (Jack will be getting a chainsaw and 4×4 for his 6th birthday later this year). The kitchen was one of those flat-pack things that most furniture seems to arrive as these days. I knew I was in trouble when I opened the box and found the little bags of nails, screws and bolts – there seemed to be hundreds of them. Of course there was also the obligatory allen key, along with its own assorted little collection of socket bolts and screws. As usual the allen key was so small it was obviously made for a 3 year old’s fingers, as though the poor child would be required to assemble the product themselves. In my hands it looked like a toothpick and was about as useful.

The five days I spent assembling the kitchen gave me plenty of time to ponder the deeper questions in life – such as, is there life on Mars? What is the purpose of our existence? And most importantly, who was the crazy person who invented the allen key and thus ruined the lives of parents all over the world? The kitchen-assembly ordeal also reminded me of how some people approach the investment process. Like the convenience of a flat-pack product, financial institutions have made it easy to take control of your investments. Push a button here and you just bought ten thousand shares in Microsoft. Click a link there and your life savings were just invested in a merger arbitrage specialist hedge fund. But is this control and convenience leading to better outcomes? The process may be easy, but what about the end product? Just like my efforts with the kitchen, which required the services of a structural engineer a week after I was finished, it may be that your investment decisions need some specialist assistance too. Just because you can control your entire financial destiny through the click of a mouse button, it doesn’t mean you necessarily should.