Stage 6 of 6 · Ongoing service

My rules, and what I do when it drops

This is the page I would keep if I had to delete the other five. Picking funds is easy. Not touching them when everything is red is the whole game.

Read this first This is education, not advice. I am showing you the rules I wrote for my own money. Yours should be your own, written by you, for your situation.

What stage six actually is

An adviser's sixth stage is the ongoing service. You meet once a year, review the plan, adjust if needed. It sounds like the least valuable part of the process, and on paper it is the thinnest.

It is also the only part I would genuinely consider paying for.

Not because of the review itself. Because of the phone call in March 2020, or February 2009, that stops you selling everything at the bottom. That call is the real product. Everything else the adviser does, you can copy in an afternoon. Talking you off the ledge is the bit that needs another human being.

So if you are going to do this yourself, you cannot just skip stage six. You have to replace it with something.

Why this matters more than fund choice

A falling market does not lose you money. It only shows you a smaller number on a screen. The loss is not real until you sell.

Selling is what converts a temporary drop into a permanent loss. And it happens at the worst possible moment, because the point of maximum fear is almost exactly the bottom.

Here is the thing that made it click for me. When the tide goes out, the boat has not shrunk. It is sitting lower, and it looks alarming, and if you panic and sell the boat while it is stuck in the mud you get mud-price for it. Wait, and the tide comes back. It always has.

The two drops that tested me

I have sat through several. These two are the ones worth showing you, because between them they cover the honest worst case and the ordinary case.

How long it actually took to recover. Figures are for the headline indices, dividends excluded.
Crash	How far it fell	Time back to the previous peak
2008-09 financial crisis	S&P 500 down about 57% from peak to trough	Roughly 4 to 5 years
2020 Covid crash	Down about 34% in 33 days, the fastest fall on record	About 5 months
2022 rates and inflation	Down about 25% over most of the year	Roughly 2 years
April 2025 tariff panic	FTSE 100 bottomed at 7,545	Months. It passed 10,000 for the first time by early 2026

Past recoveries are not a promise about future ones. What they do show is that every drop so far has been temporary for people who did not sell, and permanent for people who did.

Notice the pattern. The worst one in living memory took about four or five years. The most recent one took months. In every single case, the people who lost money permanently were the ones who sold near the bottom and then waited for it to "feel safe" before buying back in, which by definition is after the recovery has already happened.

The mistake I made, recently, knowing better

I want to be straight with you, because rules from someone who never got it wrong are worth nothing.

When Covid hit in 2020 I ended up sitting at about 50% cash. That felt like the sensible, careful thing to do at the time. It was not.

Look at the table above. That fall recovered in roughly five months. I did not start drip feeding money back in for something like a year or two, and by then most of the recovery had already happened without me. I was not in the market for the bit that mattered.

Nobody rang a bell to say it was safe. That is the trap. There is never a moment when it feels safe to go back in, because by the time it feels safe the prices have already gone back up.

What that one actually cost Being out of the market is not free just because it feels safe. Cash felt like standing still. It was not standing still, it was missing the recovery, and the recovery is where most of the return in any decade turns up. That mistake is the reason rules 1 and 6 on this page exist, and they are written the way they are because I know exactly what I will otherwise talk myself into.

And the far bigger one, spread over decades

The single most expensive thing I ever did was not a crash. It was charges.

Over the years I paid commissions and charges to advisers and pension companies that I would put at roughly 20% of my total pension pot. Not 20% of one year's growth. Something like a fifth of the whole thing, gone, in payments so small and so regular that I barely noticed any single one of them.

~20%of my total pension pot, lost to charges and commissions over the years

0individual payments that felt big enough to worry about at the time

In fairness to my younger self, the choices did not exist then. There were no cheap global index funds on a phone, no flat-fee platforms, no comparison tables. You went to a man in an office, and the charges were simply what things cost. Information that is one search away today was genuinely hard to get.

That is not true any more, which is the entire reason this site exists. The thing that cost me a fifth of my pension is now avoidable in an afternoon.

See what charges do over 30 years

My rules, written down

These were written when markets were calm, which is the only time you can write them honestly. In a crash you will negotiate with yourself, so the decisions have to already be made.

The direct debit goes in on the same day every month. It does not pause because markets look expensive, and it does not pause because they look frightening. If anything a falling market means the same money buys more.

I do not act on news. Not headlines, not forecasts, not someone confident on television. If a piece of information is on the news, it is already in the price.

I look on a schedule, not on impulse. Checking because a headline rattled me is not reviewing, it is worrying with a phone in my hand. Checking daily does not change the outcome, it only changes how I feel about it, and feeling worse is what makes people sell.

Two pots, two speeds. My pension gets looked at a couple of times a year, because there is almost nothing in it to look at. My ISA gets a monthly look, and occasionally a small rebalance. Different jobs, different cadence.

I only change something if I can write down the reason. Written down, in a sentence, that would still make sense to me in a year. In practice the reason is nearly always "it has drifted from the percentage I chose". "It feels toppy" is not a reason. Not having a reason is a reason not to change.

A fall of any size is not on its own a reason to do anything. Drops of 10% happen most years. 20% happens regularly. 30% or more has happened several times in my investing life. All of them were normal, and doing nothing was the plan working, not the plan failing.

If I ever do end up in cash, the way back in is decided in advance. A fixed amount on a fixed date until it is all back in the market. No waiting for it to feel safe, because it never does. This rule exists because I got this exact thing wrong after Covid and it cost me real money.

Why the two pots move at different speeds

People assume the bigger pot needs the most attention. Mine is the opposite way round.

My pension is deliberately dull. It is mostly a single global ETF, one fund holding thousands of companies across the world, with a small slice of emerging markets and a small slice of commodities alongside it. There is nothing in there to fiddle with. I look at it a couple of times a year, confirm it is still doing what I bought it to do, and close the tab.

My ISA gets a look once a month. Sometimes I make a small rebalancing change. Not often, and never a dramatic one.

The reason that monthly look does not turn into tinkering is the next bit, and it is the most useful discipline on this page.

I can only choose from a menu I wrote in advance Any change I make comes from a shortlist of ETFs I picked in calm conditions, with the reasons written down at the time. If something is not on the list, it does not go in, no matter how good the story sounds this week. Deciding the menu and ordering from the menu are two different jobs, and doing them on the same day is how people end up buying whatever is hot.

That is the whole trick. A monthly review sounds like a lot of activity. It is not, because by the time I sit down the range of things I am allowed to do is already small, already chosen, and already justified.

The one thing that actually does make me change

In practice, nearly every change I make comes down to one thing: rebalancing.

Rebalancing means putting the percentages back to what I chose. If I decided a slice of the pot should be 5%, and it grows into 10%, I sell some of it and bring it back to 5%.

That is it. No forecast, no view on what happens next.

What that looked like at the end of 2025

Both my ISA and my pension hold a small commodities ETF, gold, silver and copper. It is a small slice on purpose.

2025 was an extraordinary year for those three metals. Gold rose around 64%, silver more than 140%, and copper over 40%. It was the first time since 1980 that all three hit record highs in the same year.

+64%gold in 2025

+140%silver in 2025

+41%copper in 2025

Figures are approximate 2025 calendar year moves in the metals themselves. An ETF holding them will not match exactly.

Nothing about my plan changed. But a small slice that goes up that much while everything else rises gently is no longer a small slice. It had quietly become overweight, which means the pot had drifted into taking more risk on one narrow bet than I ever agreed to.

So I trimmed it back to the percentage I had chosen.

Rebalancing is taking profits, without having to be clever Selling some of the thing that has run hard and topping up the things that have not is, in plain terms, selling high and buying low. The difference is that I am not predicting anything. I am not deciding gold has peaked. I am just putting the percentages back where I set them, and the profit-taking falls out of that as a side effect.

Think of it like a thermostat. It has no opinion about the weather and makes no forecast. It just notices the room has drifted from the temperature you set, and nudges it back. Do that consistently and you end up buying more of whatever is cheap and less of whatever is expensive, for the rest of your life, without ever having to be right about anything.

It is also the only form of selling I do that does not set off alarm bells for me, because it is triggered by a number I chose in advance rather than by how I feel about the news.

The other reasons, which come up rarely

Beyond rebalancing, the rest are about my life or my costs, never the market's mood.

My timeline changed. Money I thought I would not need for twenty years is now needed in three.
My charges went up, or I found the same thing materially cheaper elsewhere.
A fund stopped doing the job I bought it for, for example it changed what it tracks.
The rules changed, allowances, tax treatment, pension access age.

Every one of those is something I could explain to you in a sentence. That is the test.

Your version of stage six

If you take one thing from this page, it is this: write your rules now, while nothing is going wrong.

It is the same reason you fit a smoke alarm on an ordinary Tuesday rather than trying to work out fire safety while the kitchen is alight. The decision is easy when it is calm and nearly impossible when it is not.

Worth writing down Which day the money goes in. Which month you review. The size of fall you have decided in advance is normal and requires no action. And the sentence you will read back to yourself when you want to sell.

What I do instead of an annual meeting

An adviser charges around one per cent a year and gives you one review. I do mine in public, every month, and it costs nothing.

Most months the entire update is: the direct debit went in, nothing else changed. That is not me running out of things to say. That is the strategy working, and I would rather show you a boring month honestly than invent activity to fill an email.

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