Patience beats panic in investing

Focus on long-term returns, not your feelings, when the markets start messing about.

- By Neesa Moodley

If you've checked your investment balance recently and felt a small urge to do something, you're not alone.

Markets wobble, headlines scream and suddenly switching funds or moving to “something safer” feels responsible, even grownup.

However, the latest Momentum Investments’ Sci-Fi Report 2025 suggests the opposite is often true.

Looking at investor behaviour over the past year, the report shows that many South Africans quietly paid a “behaviour tax” by reacting emotionally to market moves. Not through fees. Not through bad products. Through perfectly human decisions, made at exactly the wrong time.

Paul Nixon, head of behavioural finance at Momentum Investments, compared the period from September 2023 until September 2024 with April 2025 and saw that switches increased 130% because of the market's antics. At the time, there was also an inflow of well over a billion rand into the Momentum Money Market.