Can You Rebalance?
This week the world’s bourse chaos saw unprecedented stock market volatility.
Whether you think it’s all down to the rise of the pricebots meaning algorithms are all programmed to sell or buy at the same triggers and so creating havoc, or that buyers are bullish like never before about a glistening corporate future, is not the point here.
Rather, allow me to introduce a talking head from across the American airwaves this week.
Art Hogan is grandly billed as “chief market strategist with B. Riley FBR”.
In one typical rapidfire exchange (where both parties spoke quicker and almost as incomprehensibly as a cattle auctioneer in a particular hurry to finish extra-early) he offered a trio of tips when asked how ‘we’ should handle this ‘mayhem’.
His ending pair could have applied to practically anything where advice swings wildly between two poles.
They were basically to be creative and innovate, then don’t follow (in this case) the retail market – or more generally, stick to your own path rather than slavishly going with the herd.
His initial words were what more intrigued my Sales antennae.
Don’t panic. Have a plan. Have a plan to rebalance to that plan.
The last time I think I had to double-take when hearing the word ‘rebalance’ in a context new to me was during an enforced viewing of chickflick Eat Pray Love1. The memoir’s protagonist travelling the world in search of her potentially elusive, mystical, own perfect ‘balance’.
Ask google what the first victim of war is. You’ll get a list of choices. Truth, innocence, information, the plan.
It is that last one which is my personal favourite.
Many a military sage will tell you that no plan ever survives the first encounter with the enemy.
Having scenarios all laid out – like some 1970s multinational central policy unit tree diagram – is hardly an attractive idea.
Yet having a plan to know that your initial one will be amended, adapted, added to? Well, that is possible.
Don’t Panic. Keep Calm. Level heads keep the Sale on track. Especially, I suspect, when they know how they’ll “rebalance” the deal.
1 Incidentally, I loved that many reviewers of this 2010 Julia Roberts-starring movie (not quite as bad as all the critics made out, but still…) tried to create their own such ‘tricolon’, or perhaps more accurately in this case, ‘hendiatris’. Such as Peter Bradshaw’s “Yawn, Fidget, Stretch. Seethe, Growl, Rage.”
And around six months back I blogged about similar via this Gmail app ad pitch & also twelve months ago on reading this blind-date appraisal.