Southbank Investment Research is a private intelligence network with a simple but profound mission…
To find alternative ways to grow your money.
To pinpoint opportunities you won’t hear about from mainstream sources.
Share ideas that could change your life for the better.
We’re proud to share alternative ideas because we know that these are the kinds of ideas that change people’s lives.
Confident control of your own wealth. Another weapon in your arsenal to give you an advantage over other investors.
As a company, we stick by a set of core principles:
INDEPENDENCE ALWAYS BEATS DEPENDENCE
Anyone who finds our work already knows this in their gut. We’re not money managers. We’re publishers. We’re not taking your money and managing it (dependence), we’re giving you the tools you need to independently manage it for yourself.
This matters. It matters a hell of a lot. And not just because by taking charge of your own finances – or as much of them as you can – will likely lead to better investment outcome.
Taking control and responsibility of your own life doesn’t imply you don’t care about other people. Wanting to solve your own problems doesn’t mean you don’t care about other people. But cherishing independence instead of seeking dependence leads to better investments and better outcomes.
GROUPTHINK IS DEATH
The trend towards censorship and suppression of free speech is terrifying. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google de-platforming people, mainstream media branding ideas that don’t fit a narrow worldview as “populism”, or university students seeking to silence speakers they don’t agree with. At its roots it’s all groupthink. It all risks letting other people tell you what you can and can’t think. And you have to fight it.
There are very practical investment implications of that idea too.
Groupthink is the reason most people are incapable of buying at the bottom and selling at the top. In fact they do the opposite. They ignore assets when they’re cheap, hated and ignored and buy them when they’re at the top, when everyone else is buying. That’s groupthink in action again. It’s emotional, group-led investing, instead of rational, individual action.
It’s why Southbank Investment Research will never have a “house view” – the risk of that becoming infected by groupthink is just too high. Better to have a range of competing viewpoints – at the very least, it keeps everyone honest and thinking critically. At best, it protects you (the reader) from slipping into groupthink.
SEEK THE TRUTH
Efficient market theorists tell you that the reason most investors don’t beat the market is because markets are always perfectly priced. In this model, anyone that does beat the market is just lucky.
The same goes when people analyse politics, technology and other world events. Very few people saw the global financial crisis coming. Therefore anyone who did must have been lucky. It was random!
The same goes for “black swan” events like the election of Donald Trump. Most people didn’t forecast it. Only a few people took it seriously enough to see what was happening. Luck, again.
In truth? This simply isn’t the case.
If some people beat the market consistently, it’s worth understanding how that’s possible, rather than deciding it was random. The same goes for major world events like the financial crisis. How come some people saw it coming when most didn’t?
It comes down to a willingness to think critically – and to seek the truth. There were people out there in 2005 and 2006 who were highlighting the fact that the US housing market was creating dangerous fragility (Dan Denning, founder of Southbank Investment Research was one of them).
The problem wasn’t that no one saw it coming. It was the fact that the people who did were ignored, marginalised or branded “scaremongers” by the mainstream. You have to be willing to seek the truth – seek ideas on the fringe people have discounted. You may run the risk of looking stupid in the short term.
But in the long term… truth seekers win.