VALUE OF CALMNESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 77, 28 September 1938, Page 12

VALUE OF CALMNESS

War clouds lowering over the markets of the world necessarily depress the prices of investments. From London it is reported that "no business" is passing on the Stock Exchange, and from Australia it is reported that prices of non-specula-tive investments have been radically reduced and that sellers are in a state of nerves. But fear is no remedy for present troubles. Apart from the baleful influence over the investment markets of international tension, Australia has its own industrial trouble to settle and New Zealand is in the throes of a General Election. Allowing for all this the anxious holder of sound investments should remember that if he feels forced to sell them at a sacrifice someone else is ready and confident to buy at bargain prices. When the great fall in investment prices in New York at the end of 1929 is recalled it is realised that that event was the personal concern of a far greater number of j people than .the unfortunate stock- j holders concerned: it was the start of the greatest economic depression the world has ever known, which adversely affected everybody, and the effects of which have not wholly disappeared today. In the general interest, quite as much as in the interest of shareholders, whose savings are invested in established, wellmanaged undertakings, calmness and steadiness should be conspicuous features in the investment markefe 1