COLUMN - I came across an excellent article this week by Sam Ro, who writes the investment newsletter TKer. He made a distinction that I think is genuinely useful for investors.

There are broadly two types of risk.

The first is the kind we already know about. These are the risks discussed every day in the financial press, reflected in investor surveys, and debated by economists, business leaders and fund managers. 

Because they are so widely recognised, they are usually already reflected in market prices.

The second type is harder. These are the risks nobody is discussing, because nobody has thought of them yet. They arrive unannounced, and markets have to work out what they mean in real time.

Over the past few weeks, PwC, McKinsey, Natixis and Bank of America have all published surveys asking executives, strategists and fund managers what worries them most. The surveys differed, but the answers were remarkably similar. Inflation, interest rates, geopolitical conflict, government policy, energy prices, high bond yields, and the possibility of an AI bubble.

None of that is surprising. It is the financial news, summarised.

Here is the part I found interesting though. The moment a risk appears on a list like that, it has already lost most of its power to hurt you.

Not because it isn't real. Because every professional investor reading that survey has already adjusted what they are willing to pay. The worry is in the price.

This explains something that often seems backwards. Bad news gets announced and markets go up. Usually that means the news was simply not as bad as investors had already assumed it would be.

So the honest answer to "what should I be worried about" is a slightly annoying one. Probably not the things on the list. It is whatever nobody has thought to put on it yet.

Look at what has genuinely disrupted markets over the past few years.

• Covid-19.
• Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
• Trump's unexpectedly sweeping tariff announcements from 2025.
• The sudden escalation of conflict between the US and Iran in 2026.

These events were not sitting neatly at the top of investor surveys before they happened. They arrived unexpectedly, forcing markets to price in an entirely new set of possibilities. 

Often, the event itself isn't immediately the biggest problem. Uncertainty on its own is enough to push markets lower while investors work out what comes next.

As South Africans, we've experienced this ourselves.

Very few people woke up expecting Nenegate in December 2015. The rand went from R14.59 to the dollar to R15.90 within roughly 48 hours, the R186 government bond went from 8.66% to 10.40% in a week, and around R169 billion came off the market value of the banks and related shares. 

More recently, Covid sent the JSE All Share Index down by roughly a third in a matter of weeks, only to be followed by one of the strongest recoveries many of us have ever seen.

These events all felt different at the time. They dominated headlines and created enormous uncertainty. Yet, with hindsight, they became just another chapter in market history.

This is one of the reasons we don't build portfolios around forecasts. We build them around a strategy instead, a rules-based framework that anticipates the unknown.

If we knew what was coming next, we would obviously position things differently. But we don't, and neither does anyone else.

So the framework starts from the assumption that something unexpected will happen, without needing to know what it is or when it will arrive.

In practice that means exposure spread across different companies, countries, industries, asset classes and currencies.

Diversification is not an admission of ignorance. It is an acknowledgement that nobody knows the future well enough to bet everything on one outcome.

History suggests there will always be another crisis, another headline and another reason to worry. It won't be on a survey list. But history also suggests that well-diversified investors who remain focused on the long term have been rewarded for staying invested through them.

Matthew Matthee has a wealth management business that specialises in retirement planning and investments. He writes about financial markets, investments, and investor psychology. He holds a Masters Degree in Economics from Stellenbosch University and a Post Graduate Diploma in Financial Planning from UFS. [email protected]