He said: “ It takes patience, discipline and courage to follow the contrarian route to investment success. To buy when others are despondently selling, to sell when others are avidly buying.” I'm a freelance personal finance journalist who writes for the Daily and Sunday Express, Reader's Digest, The National newspaper and of course, Motley Fool UK. Now, the doom-mongers might be right. In fact, over the next year or too, there’s a fair chance they will. The banks really do face a tough time right now.

I’ve learned one thing from the pandemic days. Investing in high-street retail is risky, and could face a lot of challenges. In 2024 and the years ahead, as billions worth of investment is pumped into the emerging sector, I think a host of opportunities across a variety of businesses will surface. Still, those who invest for income might not care too much about what happens to their share prices. After all, if I buy shares today with the aim of just taking the annual cash to help fund my old age, and never intend to sell them, who cares if the share price falls?

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In recent times, there’s been a major push from Apple, which announced it was working on AI tools to challenge OpenAI’s services, including what some are calling its own ‘Apple GPT’. So what’s the investor’s biggest enemy? I’d say there are two — short-term focus, and emotion. They’re two sides of the same thing, really. Marks & Spencer has always done fine with its food offerings. But it perpetually failed to get enough people to buy its clothes. Despite the big gains in the Marks & Spencer share price of the past year, we still see forecast price-to-earnings ( P/E) ratios of only around 10 or so in the next few years. It’s a bit early to judge the dividend yield yet.

Lloyds shares reached above 54p in February. Since then, they’ve fallen by 12%. But I don’t think that’s due to any real analysis of the bank’s long-term outlook. That hasn’t changed, as far as I can see. Bank sentiment Banks and insurance firms feature in the list of biggest dividend rises, too, with HSBC Holdings at the top of the list. I’m thinking about Vodafone and BT Group in particular here. Both were a lot more resilient in the face of the pandemic slump, so they have that going for them. And it might not be fair to compare such different businesses. This trust has lifted its dividend for 39 straight years, so there should be plenty of motivation to keep it going. Merchants has GlaxoSmithKline as its top holding, and I’m upbeat about that. British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands are in the portfolio too. And while they both offer high dividend yields, that might introduce an ethical barrier for some investors.I want to talk about investment trust valuation. And why I think the Scottish Mortgage valuation, in particular, is so low that I wonder if the bargain days can last. And it also shows how much competition there is these days, chasing savers and lenders who are under so much pressure from costs. The verdict? He has written extensively on the oil market and other commodities markets, Forex, equities, bonds, economics and geopolitics for many publications, including The Financial Times, Euromoney, Financial Times Capital Insights, OilPrice, NewsBase, Risk.net, and FTSE Global Markets. Technological revolutions provide opportunities for newcomers. And the old companies with last year’s technology can suffer. Verdict