SPH Introduction and myth busting

The podcast hosts discuss their new podcast called "Seek Professional Help" where they aim to educate each other and debunk myths in the fields of finance and health/fitness. They share some common myths in their respective industries, such as the belief that the stock market always goes up and that running causes arthritis. They also debunk the myth that more risk equals more return in finance, and explain that K-Tape is actually ineffective for anything other than providing a protective barrier to the skin. Finally, they discuss the myth that it's a great time to buy when the market is down, highlighting that while there may be some good bargains, not all companies will recover. Here we are Dave, here we are, in a podcast room. Yeah, it's an odd one isn't it? It feels really awkward recording a podcast. Yeah, it's, we thought it would be really easy, turns out it's quite difficult. Let's be honest, this is our third or fourth take of even trying to just talk, because I felt that I suddenly had to be like, hello everyone and welcome to. We've become toddlers, we're trying to learn how to talk. So the project after what I've learned more than anything is that we are shit at naming things. Yeah. So we've kind of stuck for now to call in this thing, seek professional help. Yep, I think it kind of makes sense. It hits a lot of the reasons why we're doing it without actually saying why we're doing it. So it works, I like it, it's short and snappy. Yeah, as opposed to some of our other ideas. We had some shocking things. So the concept of the podcast, right, is you're a wealth manager, correct, have I got your title right? Yeah, you've got it right. I probably will call you an accountant a lot, but you're a chartered wealth manager and I know fuck all about your industry, I'm a physio, you probably know more about my industry than I know about yours. Yeah, I mean, just from going to the gym since we've been quite young, I'm pretty stacked, so yeah, I've picked up tips and tricks along the way, but I don't know the details. I know from, I guess, gym bros, and that's kind of it. And we want to, I guess, educate each other. All these years I've taken the piss out a little bit out of you being an accountant and finance, and it's not a world that I've, if I'm honest, found massively interesting growing up, hence why I never went there. But actually, as I've got older, it is quite interesting, it now impacts me more, I can't just pretend that finance is something I don't have to think about at all. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I guess similar for me, I make a joke that you just apply DP. Which I do. That's all you kind of do. Five years of study just to correctly apply DP. But as I, and this is going to sound like I'm really old now, but as I'm getting older, I'm actually getting more injuries and small pains and aches, and I'm only 28. So it's really sad. But I want to learn how to avoid it, prevent it, and get through it, I guess. So we're going to try and debunk myths in each industry, educate each other, educate ourselves, learn how to make a podcast, which has been the biggest challenge so far, recording studios, all of that nonsense. Not sounding like a knob on the thing. But the name Seek Professional Help was a long time coming, because those industries of wealth and health, I couldn't get, what was it? Wealth. Wealth. Wealth out of my head. I was sure it was going to be called W brackets H, health. That sounded really clever. I thought that was like a million. It was a close second. But yeah, I hope you enjoy what's to come. Yeah, absolutely. Shall we rock on? Give it a go. Let's do it. Welcome to our first ever episode of Seek Professional Help. Today, we are going to just do a quick episode on a few common myths in our industries. As we just said, the premise of this whole project, I guess, is to kind of cut out a lot of the bullshit that we see around on social media, and try and challenge some of the things people believe, both in finance and kind of health fitness space. So let's crack on. I'm excited, Dave. This is going to be a good one, I think. I hope so. I hope so too. So do you want to start us off with a finance-y type one? Yeah, certainly. So my first myth, the stock market always goes up, right? I hear this from, this is like your standard throwaway comment where you kind of hear it down the pub, or it's just everywhere. And it's something like, it is true, right? I can't, but... No, it's not a myth. Thank you. Our first ever myth is true. But let's unpack it a little bit, because I think just saying the stock market always goes up is kind of, it's like saying to someone, oh yeah, you're going to make money in it. No worries. Don't worry about it. But you need to dive into that a little bit more, okay? So the context behind that is, so the stock market does tend to move with economic growth, and it moves along with company earnings as well. So you do get this trend of like an up-and-to-the-right graph. If you look at any kind of major market, so like taking the US as an example, so the S&P 500, I think it's probably the most famous one that kind of people usually refer to, is you, on average, over like the last hundred years, if you looked at the graph, it is like this. Up and to the right, you've got this average 9% return, and people just assume that that's what you're going to get. But the truth is that, yeah, if you did go into that and you're going to hold it in a really long time horizon, on average, you are going to get a 9% return, or there and thereabouts. But people don't, your portfolio isn't just made up of a single index or a market that you're tracking. So if you're an investor, you do tend to go into lots of different things, and you're trying to diversify and all this kind of stuff. But when you really look into it, there are different markets that if you'd have held them over the same time, you actually wouldn't have made money, or you would have made really small amounts. So taking S&P for an example, obviously the S&P is split up into lots of different sectors. So part of it is in financial, so like banks and stuff, technology companies, all this kind of stuff. And you can split it out into sectors. So looking at energy, for example, so the S&P Energy Market Index, fill up with all these big energy and oil companies. If you'd have held that from the same amount of time, like over, say, a 10-year basis, your return would have been like 0.3%, right? And that's not being inflation. So your real return is going to be negative amount in that. So just saying the stock market goes up isn't really like a... I know it's not a proper myth, but it's like you've got to unpack that a little bit more. Okay. So is it more that a more accurate description is if you take a really long-term view, it always goes up. But in the more short-term, or even like relative short-term, it fluctuates. Would that be a better... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So over a long-term time horizon and taking the market as a whole, yeah, you're going to make money. But if you look at more specific sectors or even stocks, you're probably... you're flipping a coin a little bit more there. Got you. Okay. So that's my first one. First one. I hope that was kind of interesting for you, Dave. But I'm interested to hear what your first one's going to be. Okay. So my first one is about beliefs around running and arthritis. Okay. So I always hear from patients, I don't know if this is something you believe, but patients come in and say, I know running's bad for my knees and it can give me arthritis. I hear that all the time from people just like off the cuff being, oh yeah, that's really bad for your knees. Yeah. All the time. Do you believe that running gives you arthritis? So I don't, but I wouldn't... Should I explain why I don't? Yeah, yeah, please. So I actually heard a podcast really recently that the guy, I can't remember who it was, but the guy was basically suggesting that using your knees in a correct form is actually beneficial. It has the opposite effect. It's when you don't use your knees is when it's kind of like use it or lose it, right? So that's kind of the way I was told by this person. So there's certainly no conclusive evidence that runners have higher rates of hip or knee osteoarthritis. So loads of studies now look at scans of people's hips and knees and they look at their running history across their life and actually there's evidence to show that certainly recreational runners have lower amounts of arthritic changes to the bones. So there's no correlation whatsoever? No, no conclusive correlation at all. And potentially the phrase that you use that running's bad for my knees, I think the one thing I would say is that if suddenly somebody who isn't well conditioned, so isn't strong in certain muscles starts running, they might end up causing injuries, but more likely to do with their other structures and overloading other structures because of little compensatory mechanisms and stuff. So running can cause you pain in your knee, but don't be scared of it. It's not going to degenerate the bones. They're not going to start crumbling away on you. You're not going to be in a wheelchair. You're not going to be in a wheelchair. Actually for long-term knee health, studies are actually beginning to show that we can make positive changes to our knee health. So yeah, running doesn't give you arthritis. Done. Next. Go. All right, so my next one, okay, the statement, more risk equals more return, right? Have you heard that before? Yeah. I'm going to say it again. I feel like it's one that is thrown around a lot and people kind of believe it. It's like, yeah, I'm going to take loads of risk. I'm going to get all this upside return. But again, you've got to unpack it. What does risk mean to you? What is risk, Dave? How would you define it for you? Financially or just in life? However you want to do it. Both. Let's go both. So yeah, I'd say risk is how willing am I to... It's a hard question. It's a really hard question without just using the word risk. Yeah, and just to jump in there, so risk, people in finance love to quantify stuff. It comes to probability, doesn't it? Yeah, so they want to get numbers in it. But I'll let you finish in a second. So yeah, people want to quantify it. And without using the word risk, it's really hard to do it. It's really hard. It's really hard. I sound like a right idiot. But risk, without using the word risk, how do I define risk? I guess something that's high risk is something that I know is going to give me a lot of reward. But there's a low probability that it will come true. Okay. Does that make sense? Taking a risk is, again, financially, I guess, quitting a stable job where I know there's a guaranteed income for the chance of making a lot of money. But you could also have fucking no money or go bankrupt. So that's your downside risk, isn't it? No. It's a tough question, so we'll go into it. So yeah, as I say, in finance, people want to quantify stuff all the time. Risk, if you're looking at the stock market, they will use something called standard deviation. I'm sure you know what it is. So it basically measures the variations around an average number. And then that number is essentially what you'd call volatility or standard deviation. So if the price goes up 10%, down 10%, you're kind of going to get your volatility or your standard deviation around the 10% number because that's how you want to quantify it. But if you think about that, you're measuring risk there on both upside and downside when, in reality, you don't care so much about your upside risk. What you actually care about is your downside risk because that's the part of your risk you're actually potentially going to lose money or you're going to lose something, right? Because your upside of it is great, but the downside is the thing that is scary. So getting back to the question, not the question, the myth. So more risk equals more return. If you lose 50% of your, say we started with £100, it goes down by 50%, you've got to get back to zero, or sorry, if you want to get back to 100, you've got to make a 100% return, right? So that means by taking more risk and having that more deviation, you've now got, say you had that experience, that fall, you've now got to get a return of 100 just to get back to where you started. So if we think about it in different ways, like you could take less risk and potentially lose less, but then if you fall, say 20%, you've actually not got to make as much to get back to where you started. So by saying that more risk is more return isn't necessarily true, even though it can be. So as an example, we could go with, again, using the energy sector, right? The S&P energy. So over a 10-year annualised period, I said it made 0.3%, but your volatility that you experienced there was actually close to 30%. So that risk that you've taken for your return is really bad because if your volatility is 30%, you'd kind of expect your return on that to be way bigger, but it wasn't. So yeah, I think what I'm trying to say is you want to look at it as a risk-adjusted basis. So risk-adjusted return is probably a better look. So using your example, if you're going to change jobs and go self-employed or something like that, you've got potential of losing, and I say you're making 30 grand a year, you've got potential of basically losing 30 grand, but your upside is uncapped. So that risk-adjusted return is actually a pretty good trade-off because if you've got the ability to earn 100 grand instead of losing 30, that return ratio is actually a fair amount. But yeah, risk is relative to everybody. It's kind of subjective, like my risk will be different to your risk, and yeah, it's a really hard one to... And I think we both, I know we both read that book by, I think it's Daniel Kahneman, kind of. Yeah, yeah, Daniel Kahneman. All about statistics, and there's that phenomenon around loss aversion. So behaviorally, humans are going to respond more negatively to losing £100 than they would respond positively to gaining £100. So even though it being the same amount of money, the positive psychological impact of gaining is less than the psychological impact of losing. Yeah, I think it's actually, it's double. So you perceive a loss two times more than you perceive a gain. So yeah, but again, it's different for everybody as well. Of course. Yeah. Cool. All right, next one. God, it's like an absolute steam train, isn't it? I know. So, K-Tape, are you aware what K-Tape is? Have you seen or heard of K-Tape? Yes, I actually am a user of K-Tape, because I tend to get really bad blisters any time I run. Okay. Yeah, so sorry, I actually use it on my feet instead of plasters. Wow, okay. That looks like it shocked you then. Well, it did, I've just not really used it for that method. I would probably use a blister plaster for blisters, but it's probably cheaper and you're a cheap plaster, aren't you? Exactly. Okay, well actually, I'm not going to, I thought I was about to ruin your day, if I'm honest. Okay. But I now don't think I'm going to ruin your day, because I'm sure the blister plaster, K-Tape, may be effective because it will provide a protective barrier to the skin. I'm really interested where you're going with this. But K-Tape is fucking useless, otherwise. Interesting. That's my myth. Okay. So, apologies, I didn't warn you in advance. If you're a K-Tape user, I might have just broken a lot of your life. And we are, I think there's, you know, a chat to have about placebo here, which is too long to go into in a quick-fire myth-busting round. But there is no clinical evidence that K-Tape is effective for anything. And just for everyone listening, K-Tape is, I feel like rugby players love it. You see them strapped up on their knees or on their shoulder or whatever. Potentially. I think potentially rugby players use more of the more resistant. So the K-Tape, for people listening, you might not know what it is, is kinesiology tape. It's pretty stretchy, often coloured tape. Rugby players often use more like zinc oxide and supportive tape, which is a different type. It's more rigid. Tighter. And it possibly does provide joint support and stuff, even though, again, the evidence around that is very, very shaky. But let's stick specifically to K-Tape for this. You know, you'll normally see maybe up the back of their leg like a blue strip or something. Runners, I associate it more with runners and crossfitters. OK. You see it, that they've got this blue strap across their back on their shoulders are commonplace or up the back of the leg. But yeah, unfortunately, K-Tape users and... It's there for show. Well, again, and when I said the placebo thing, if you did believe K-Tape works, it possibly did work for you and it possibly did reduce your pain. But now, because I've broken the myth, it might not do that. So it's a big apology to any K-Tape users listening. But I might save you some money here. And the evidence of why it's useful from a placebo point of view is also really interesting to me. And the fact that you might put it over a joint and it might therefore provide you a small amount of awareness that you've got an injury that you might want to protect might be enough to reduce your pain there. But yeah, if you look at a load of studies that go into people using K-Tape in different ways, basically, they found no difference in how it was applied. Right. So one group apply it with a professional physio putting it on at a good degree of stretch, X, Y, Z. And the other group, just someone just slapping it on. And the differences in pain outcomes, performance outcomes, are no different. Interesting. There's no difference in people's strength or speed, let's say, when they're running, if they've got it on or if they haven't got it on. There are some very, and again, I think probably coming back into the placebo element, some potential small decreases in pain if somebody uses the tape. Okay. But in the other measurable things, you know, strength, speed, and actually that, for me, more to the point, and I might be doing physio, there's a lot of discredit here, but you can have a sham application as they put it in the literature, someone just kind of whacking it on and not being K-tape. So if somebody has a placebo, okay, I've got K-tape on, but it's not the branded K-tape. Or somebody doing it in the really proper way. Sorry, guys, not a thing. But it looks kind of cool. It looks cool. And it's good for blisters. Yeah, for blisters? I can confirm. But I guess nobody thinks racing stripes make you faster on a car if they really think about it, but they look cool. So you know what, Warriors? Keep going. It's a fashion statement. Come see me and I'll apply your K-tape expertly. Sorry, I feel that we might have just written off that K-tape sponsorship deal. We are still interested if you are. Please. Scott, over to you. Okay, so my last myth. Quicker. Sorry. Okay, so my last myth, keeping with stock market for this one, just to kind of keep the theme going. Again, it's another statement I always hear down the pub or in like the back of a taxi. Prove it. Yeah. I'm in bars. That's where I work. It's a great time to buy. The market's down 90%. All the stock's down 90%. It's cheap. Buy it, right? Yeah. I really believe that one. If someone tells me something's down, Bitcoin's down by it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think... I've bought Bitcoin. You get this all the time. You hear from someone, look, it's down 80%. It's down 50%. Buy it and you're going to make loads of money, right? In some cases, yeah. It could have happened and you could buy it at a really good time. But what happens usually, so when the market as a whole goes down, you tend to get good companies go down and bad companies. It doesn't discriminate, okay? So you do get some really great bargains because you'll get a 50% decline as in a very extreme example. And you might get something like an Amazon back in the 2000.com crash when it was down sort of over that. If you'd bought then, you'd make in like 2000% back. However, there are also companies who deserve to go down where if you'd have bought them, you actually wouldn't be making your money back. This concept is something called value investing brought to the surface by Benjamin Graham. He's a very famous investor. And then Warren Buffett, who everyone probably knows who was a student of Graham and he kind of developed kind of this strategy onwards. But yeah, it's essentially buying a company at a bargain that is lower than what it should be priced. But that said, going back to the way you might not make your money. So again, using the 2000 as an example, because this is when one of these great crashes happened. You had a company called General Electric. A US company was the biggest by market cap, biggest company in the S&P 500 at the time. I think its price peaked at 350 odd dollars. Right. If we fast forward 23 years later today, General Electric, what do you reckon its price is right now, Dave? Its share price. What was that again? So it peaked at 350 23 years ago. 200. 200. And this is based, this is assuming that the market has since 2000 gone up a lot. It's gone up a lot. So if you bought it today, or if you'd have held it all through that, you'd be currently only on $111. So just kind of emphasizing the fact that just because you bought it high and it's gone down, it's not necessarily going to come back. I made your facts sound a little bit less dramatic. Yeah, I know. You wanted me to say 3 million, didn't you? You know what? If you hadn't set me up with the rest of the facts, I would have given you what you wanted. Should we do that bit again? $1 million. No, absolutely not. That is interesting though because I'm definitely a believer of buying when things are low. Which is a good solution. Usually, it's a better time because you're most likely going to get a better price for it. And no one knows what the future of this price is going to be. I just picked this one as an example. But yeah, look at Bitcoin. It topped at $60,000. Will it get back to there? I don't know. So my last one is all about back pain and lifting in the gym. So you might not be a believer of this. You're probably not. However, it's really common in social media and I've had hundreds probably of patients saying, I don't like to lift in the gym. I don't like to deadlift. I don't like to squat. I don't like to lift too much weight because I know it can be really bad for my back and I might injure my back and my discs will pop out and those kind of things. Have you heard that before? Yeah, not so long ago. I think I was deadlifting in the gym and there were people next to me basically talking about how they would never deadlift because of those very reasons and I wasn't using a belt or anything like that and they were like, I think they actually made a comment like, you're brave. I was like, okay. Wow. Do you believe that? No, I think within reason, right? You don't want to go and try and do 300 kilos and then bust your back out because that could happen but if you build up to it. Absolutely and I think this could be a whole episode and I've actually got a lot I would like to talk about here but let's keep it short and sweet. Similar to point one about the running thing, if you do something unaccustomed that your body's not ready for and you don't do things in a really gradual, sensible way, you do run the risk of getting an injury. However, like with the running thing and the arthritis, evidence actually shows us that people who lift frequently and regularly in a, I don't even want to say good way because it's actually again, not about the position the position that you lift as well that's another topic but doesn't seem to affect you know, having a flex spine doesn't seem to be actually a risk factor at all for back pain. Again, as long as you didn't suddenly decide to pick up 300 kilos when you've never deadlifted before. When you say flex spine, is that? So a bent spine. There's this obsession by keeping really straight in the lower back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, people who lift regularly actually their spinal structures, their discs and other structures within their back adapt and will be at lower risk of degenerative changes and conditions than those who don't. Basically, those who don't lift and are inactive have higher rates of back pain and degeneration in later life. Yeah, yeah, I mean, again, that makes sense, doesn't it? I feel like if you're not using it you're losing it. Nice. Yeah, I'd like to say. So yeah, again, there's no evidence about people who lift regularly getting lots of back pain and there's not a lot of evidence about lifting form changing back pain either. See, that's the interesting one. I think the first part of that you kind of knew just from going to the gym quite a lot but the form thing is more of a that's kind of drilled into you like when you first, I think when we first ever went like at 15, 16 it was always like keep that back straight you're going to hurt it but yeah. And I think I think we could you know I said this podcast is very much this first episode was just let's just bosh out a few quick facts. Yeah, yeah. That could be probably the back pain thing in terms of talking about what the evidence says and doesn't say around a neutral straight spine and a flex spine there's actually a whole world of clashing heads in social media at the moment. And I think sometimes you have to take arguments like that and be a bit like take the neutral middle ground and look at both sides and just be sensible rather than being extreme either way Yeah, yeah. Calling people morons and all of these things you've got to approach these topics in a more sensible way than I think is being done but yeah I'm sure we'll get into any of these these myths a little bit in more detail. Yeah, I think it's important to keep it kind of quick but yeah 100% you can unpack a lot of stuff that we've spoken about today so yeah I think let's wrap it up really quick one today and I look forward to moving forward with this project yeah I guess I'm very excited the format will be slightly different in the longer episodes we're gonna be predominantly about one of either a finance episode or a physio episode yeah so we're gonna take it in turns so trying to keep things interesting and yeah any questions that people do have and want to want to know that you know if you've seen something that you're like oh that'd be really interesting send them in we can yeah see if we can help with anything yeah so these six little quick myth-busting topics which we can build upon so thanks Dave no thank you and see you next week