Once more unto the market – Nick Stewart
The fireworks went up on Thursday night to commemorate a plot that failed 421 years ago but is retold every year anyway. Some stories outlive the records that contradict them.
On October 25, 1415, Henry V’s tired and dysentery-ridden army stood across a narrow valley near Agincourt in northern France. It had rained hard through the night. The field in front of them had been freshly ploughed.
By nightfall the French nobility lay in the mud. In Henry V, Shakespeare claimed 10,000 French dead against just 29 English and gave us the immortal “band of brothers” speech. It is magnificent theatre.
But it is theatre. Modern historians dispute the numbers: Professor Anne Curry estimates 8500 to 9000 English against about 12,000 French, while others argue the odds were far greater. Tellingly, newspapers marking the battle’s anniversary printed Shakespeare’s words, not contemporary accounts. The better story won.
Then there is Sir John Falstaff. Shakespeare’s charming but dishonest rogue was first called Oldcastle, after a real knight, and renamed when the family objected. The new name echoed Sir John Fastolf, a real soldier of Henry’s French wars who carried a coward’s reputation after Patay in 1429. Britannica calls Shakespeare’s treatment of him libellous. A real man’s name, borrowed for a fictional character.
Falstaff is wonderful company. At Shrewsbury he plays dead, announces that the better part of valour is discretion, then claims the credit for killing Hotspur. He admits to misusing the King’s press: taking money from men who could afford to buy their way out of service and marching off with those who could not. The tale improves with every telling, and there is always an angle.
Newly crowned, King Henry meets him in the street. “I know thee not, old man.”
The 2019 film gives him a knee. On the eve of the battle, Falstaff promises rain, and when asked how he can be so sure, he says his right knee is aching, and it only aches when rain is near. The rain comes, the field turns to mud, and the mud wins the day. That knee is the film’s invention, not Shakespeare’s. But it is the part we remember, and being right once is how a forecaster keeps talking.
Markets have their Falstaffs too, and most of them read the market the way grandad reads his knee.
Harvard researchers matched more than 11 million doctor visits by older Americans against daily rainfall records. They found no link between rain and joint or back pain. The knee is certain. The data is not interested.
Economic forecasters fare little better. A study of 153 recessions across 63 countries between 1992 and 2014 found the consensus had called just five of them by April of the year before.
Morningstar estimates the average dollar in US funds earned 8.7% a year over the decade to December 2025, against 9.9% for the funds themselves. That 1.2% a year was lost to buying and selling at the wrong times. On a $200,000 KiwiSaver balance, that is $2400 a year, every year. Not to the market. To the story.
Henry’s speech mattered. Men hold the line because someone they trust gives them a reason to. A sound plan with nobody to keep you in it will not survive the first wet morning.
But the speech did not win Agincourt. Ground chosen with care did. So did a narrow frontage, sharpened stakes, massed archers, and a French command divided against itself. The rain helped, but nobody’s knee ordered it. Henry could not forecast the weather. He could choose ground where the weather hurt his enemy more than it hurt him.
That is the job with money. You cannot forecast the market. You can choose your ground: costs, diversification and a level of risk that matches your goals and your capacity to bear it. Then hold the line when the weather turns.
The fiduciary question is Falstaffs in reverse. Who is being paid, by whom, and for what?
Your portfolio is not a medieval battle with fictitious characters. It needs no hero, no villain, and no rousing speech. “Banish plump Jack”, as Henry did. The person who keeps you in the line is not the one with the better story. It is the one who already chose the ground with you, in writing, while it was still dry.
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