There's a client I speak to about once a year. He rings in February, asks two questions, tells me about his daughter, and that's it until the next February. For a long time I thought I wasn't serving him properly. Then I looked at his folios next to some clients I speak to monthly, and had to sit with an uncomfortable thought.
The people I hear from least are, by a clear margin, the ones doing best.
What the quiet ones actually do
I went through it properly, because I wanted to know whether I was imagining a pattern. I wasn't, and the pattern is duller than I'd like.
They set something up, usually years ago. They raise it occasionally, generally when their income changes. They don't add schemes. They don't move between them. When markets fall, they either don't notice or don't act, and I only find out afterwards that they didn't call because there was nothing they wanted to do.
That's the whole method. There isn't a hidden second half where they're doing something clever.
What the frequent callers have in common
I should be careful here, because plenty of people who call often are simply interested, and that's fine. Interest isn't the problem.
The pattern that costs money is a specific one: calls that cluster around market news. A call after a sharp fall asking whether to stop. A call after a strong run asking whether to move into whatever did well. A call after somebody at a wedding mentioned a scheme.
Each individual call is reasonable. The trouble is that a portfolio managed in response to news is a portfolio being adjusted at precisely the moments when adjusting is worst, and our post on why somebody else's fund did better covers where a lot of those calls originate.
It isn't about knowledge
This is the part that surprised me most.
Some of the quiet clients could not tell you what a benchmark is. Some of the frequent callers can explain expense ratios in more detail than I can. Knowledge and outcome are not tracking each other at all in my client list.
What separates them is the tendency to act. Knowing more seems to create more opinions, and more opinions create more reasons to change something. Whereas somebody who set it up and got on with their life has no mechanism for interfering.
I'm not arguing for ignorance. I write a lot of explanatory pages and I think understanding helps. It just isn't the thing that decides the result, and I'd rather say that plainly.
The one thing quiet clients do get wrong
Being fair about it: doing nothing has one genuine failure mode, and I see it in exactly this group.
Things go stale. An old mobile number sits on a folio for six years. A bank account from a previous job is still linked. A nominee was never added, or names somebody from before a marriage. Nobody notices, because nobody is looking, and it only surfaces when a request finally needs to go through.
So the version of this I'd actually recommend isn't doing nothing. It's doing nothing about the investments and something about the records, once a year, which our page on how a folio works lists out.
How the quiet ones started
Worth asking, since the obvious question is whether these people were simply born patient.
Mostly they weren't. What they had in common was a straightforward setup at the beginning: one or two holdings, an amount they could sustain, and a clear idea of what the money was for. Nothing complicated enough to invite tinkering.
The households that fidget are often the ones that started with too many pieces. Six schemes bought at different times for different reasons produce a portfolio you have to have opinions about, and having opinions leads to acting on them. Our page on portfolio overlap covers what that collection usually looks like underneath.
So the quiet behaviour may be partly a consequence of the initial design rather than of temperament. That is encouraging, because design is something you can choose.
Why this is awkward for me
A business built on service is supposed to demonstrate value through contact. Regular reviews, updates, a phone call when something happens. That's what looks like good service.
But if the clients doing best are the ones I speak to once a year, then a lot of contact is theatre, and I've written before about why we don't send monthly portfolio updates.
Where I think the real value sits is narrower and harder to show. Being available in the month somebody wants to stop. Knowing the household well enough to say that a proposed change is a reaction rather than a decision. Handling the paperwork so it doesn't rot. None of that fills a calendar.
When you should call
Since this could read as "leave me alone", here's the honest list of when contact is worth it.
- Something changed in your life. A job, a child, a move, an income change, a new obligation. That's when a plan might genuinely need adjusting.
- A goal date is approaching. The money should be getting safer, and that needs doing on a schedule, as our page on when to sell covers.
- You're about to do something because of how you feel. That's exactly the call worth making, and often the conversation ends with doing nothing.
- The annual paperwork check. Boring, and the one thing the quiet clients skip.
What's not on the list is the market having moved.
The exception I would make
There is one group where infrequent contact genuinely is neglect rather than success, and it is worth separating out.
A household where one person handles everything and the other knows nothing is not quietly doing well. It is quietly accumulating a problem, and the absence of contact means nobody is noticing. Our post on the conversation most couples have not had is about exactly that situation.
The same applies where the holdings were set up years ago for a goal that has since arrived or disappeared. Nothing being done is fine when the arrangement still matches the household. It is not fine when the household changed and the arrangement did not.
So the quiet approach works on one condition: that somebody checks, once a year, whether the plan still describes your life. That check is the part I would not skip.
What I say to new clients now
I've started being upfront about it in first meetings, which occasionally goes down badly.
I tell them that if this works, they'll hear from me rarely, and that a year in which nothing happens is a successful year rather than a neglected one. Some people find that reassuring. A few decide they'd prefer somebody more active, and they go elsewhere, which is a fair choice.
The February client, incidentally, has never asked me whether his schemes are the best available. He asks whether he should raise the amount, and whether anything needs updating. Two good questions, once a year, and then he goes back to his life.
Twelve years in, I think that's close to the whole thing. Myfolios is an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor (ARN-145870) working from Indore since 2014, and we're happy to be the people you don't need to call very often.
