Owning Bicycles - It is very much like investing in the markets

Dear Reader,

If any of  you are cyclists/triathletes  you will be intimately aware of the formula  N+1.  I started cycling with a view to doing triathlons back in 2010 and seem now to have accumulated 6 bikes and yet it still doesnt seem enough.  Each of them has a name and holds different affections for me.

Here is a picture of Barry - the only bike my wife will allow in the house  (why has he named his bike Barry like the cat I can hear you groan).  The Vroomen White Cervelo soloist when it came out was the most aero competition bike in the world I think and is a sort of triathlon road bike hybrid.  Barry sounds a bit better to me. If it was good enough for Cancellara it was certainly good enough for a fat ginger scotsman.

Bikes are expensive things. The list price for this new back in the day without wheels was 7500 USD which explains why it lives indoors.

Anyway not to bore you with bikey stuff. I took someone out for a 40km training ride using Barry on Sunday and around 20km from home my rear gear cable decided to snap from overuse.  I had to cycle all the way back in the hardest gear and fix it. This took a lot of swearing, tweezers and some luck as the cables go through the frame of the bike.  A small thing breaking that cost £1.50 online caused a bike originally worth 8,500 usd to become a hunk of junk

The point of this sorry tale is that it doesn't matter the implied quality of funds you invest in. If they are doing the small things wrong eventually it will cause massive problems. If we look at Woodford funds they would have been in the past like a top end bike. Somewhere along the way a cable has snapped and now they are something you just want to leave in the garage and forget.

Owning several bikes is  very much like  investing in the markets  (no somehow he managed to get Swiss Toni in the article again I hear you sob). Diversification of risk is key to not finding yourself invested in just one or two funds where the cables snap and you have nothing else to fall back on.  If one breaks you can rely on one of the others to keep you going.

Happy to talk to anyone about Bikes and funds.

Just a thought on a Wednesday

Don 'I look good in lycra' King