Should your politics affect your approach to the stock market?
I was interviewing a chap for The Guardian the other day, when he said a strange thing to me: "I'm a bit left wing, but I have to admit that I do own a couple of shares." In fact he was a member of the Lib Dems, but he still felt the need to apologise for owning a couple of stocks.
And he wasn't talking about stocks in, say, tobacco companies, or defence firms delivering water cannons to repressive regimes. He owned stocks in Morrisons (LSE: MRW), where only the most diehard anti-capitalist would baulk at buying their daily groceries.
So why the shame? Why apologise? And to me, a financial journalist? It made me ask myself this question: does buying stocks and shares automatically make you right wing?
Sordid business
No, seriously. I think there is still some lingering distaste among the chattering classes for the grubby business of buying stocks and shares in the hope -- gasp! -- of actually making money out of them.
People who before the crash would happily boast that their property had risen £100,000 in an hour, will only mumble that their shares in, say, Barclays, have done quite nicely lately.
Peculiar, isn't it? The chap I interviewed was clearly embarrassed, and I have to admit that I don't go thumping on about the fact either.
Gold Not Coal
I think this partly goes back to the great "Tell Sid" privatisation campaigns of the 1980s. They were of course spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher, with her vision of a shareholder democracy, and there are many people out there who can't forgive anything she was involved in.
I was a student in south Yorkshire in those far-flung days, with spiky hair and a Coal Not Dole sticker on the lapel of my donkey jacket, so you can guess what I thought about this sneaky capitalist plot.
Yet here I am, a quarter of a century later, paying a lot more attention to what Maynard Paton says about the economy than Marx and Engels. And the only time I pay close attention to miners is when I'm wondering whether to invest in copper or gold.
I spend a lot of time talking to fund managers and analysts, so talking about investing for money seems quite normal to me, and I was interested to note that embarrassment lingers in some liberal quarters.
Vanity Share
This genteel aversion goes even further back than Thatch. I'm currently reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair, published in 1847, and in those days the upper classes openly viewed anybody involved in trade or the City with contempt (while condescending to marry them to clear their gambling debts).
So the well-bred British have long felt there is something unseemly about the naked pursuit of profit, while managing to secure themselves a very decent standard of living nonetheless.
Interestingly, I have never noted this attitude among Americans, who seem thoroughly untroubled by making pots of money from stocks and shares.
Down with pensions!
It is an important issue, because I'm sure it deters plenty of people from benefiting from investing, particularly when they are young, and have more ideological qualms about this type of thing. This is a shame, when you consider that your 20s is probably the best time to invest, because your holdings have decades to grow in value.
It certainly deterred me. I wouldn't even join my company's money-purchase pension scheme for the first five years, because I considered them an evil capitalist mechanism. Boy do I regret that now.
This antipathy is also daft, given that the vast majority of the working population does invest in the stock market, through their pension funds. I'm sure there are plenty of Lib Dems and Labour voters among them.
Wrong or right?
So does investing in stocks and shares mean you are right wing? To a degree, the answer is yes. It doesn't automatically make you a Tory (so my Lib Dem contact can rest easily), but it does involve signing up to certain assumptions.
Such as? Well, that you are individually responsible for looking after your own financial wellbeing, rather than the state.
Or that free markets, including stock markets, are a great generator of wealth, and there is nothing wrong in enjoying your share.
Or that capitalism, despite its many faults, isn't a source of absolute evil, and there is no shame in profiting from it.
Bizarrely, even as somebody who has written about investments for more than a decade, I still feel slightly shamefaced about saying these things out loud. That's a hangover from being a member of the British liberal middle classes. And the only person who has suffered as a result is yours truly.
Be poorer, feel better
If you still feel there's something unseemly about investing for profit, or loathe the thought that you might have a drop of right wing blood in your body, you can always clear your conscience by investing in ethical funds.
That way, you can dress up investing as a left-wing political act, and feel proud, rather than embarrassed about it.
But it would be self-defeating to renounce investing altogether, because right or left, it really is nothing to be ashamed about.
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