Martin Gilbert: Sit tight and be patient during wild times

Opportunities in active investment

They say (misquoting Tom Stoppard) that age is a high price to pay for experience. But in the type of wild financial markets we have seen over the past few weeks, it is a price that’s almost worth paying.

It has been a long time since we have seen such volatile stock and bond markets (14 years to be exact) for the type of market conditions where prices gyrate and liquidity does not just dry up - it disappears. In that time, a new generation of financial professionals has grown up. In asset management, they have risen from graduate trainees to portfolio managers during a time of extraordinarily benign markets. You could turn your screen off one evening and feel pretty confident you would come back to the same valuations in the morning. Kwarteng exits IMF meetings early as U-turn rumours...