Participant Accounts
We have collected accounts from participants across several cohorts. These are their own words, edited only for length. We have not selected exclusively for positive sentiment.
Back to HomeAccounts from recent cohorts. Names and identifying details are used with permission.
"Reading What the Markets Did was not what I expected. I came thinking it would feel like a course. It felt more like a reading group where the text happened to be forty years of market data. I found it clarifying. I still re-read the note I made on the third evening."
"I attended The Households of Friends with some hesitation — I wasn't sure it would be relevant to my situation. The case studies were carefully chosen and the discussion was genuinely useful. I came away thinking differently about one particular question I had been avoiding for about two years."
"The almanac programme is the best use of six months I have made in some time. I will be honest — in the second month I was uncertain whether the observations I was writing were useful. By the fifth month I could see patterns I hadn't been able to name before. I have registered for a second cycle."
"I have sat through a number of financial seminars over the years where someone eventually began talking about a product. It hasn't happened here across two programmes. The sessions are genuinely educational in the old sense of the word — they ask you to think, not to buy."
"The group size made a real difference. Twelve people is small enough that you can't sit quietly through three evenings without contributing something. I found this uncomfortable in a useful way — it made me articulate thoughts I had been keeping vague."
"The Households of Friends addressed questions I had been thinking about but hadn't discussed seriously with anyone — partly because it's difficult to discuss your own household finances openly. Using other people's anonymized cases made it possible to think about the questions without the discomfort of discussing your own situation directly."
Three accounts of how participants engaged with specific programmes, with their own assessment of what changed.
At 53, Mongkut had accumulated savings through consistent discipline but felt he was making investment decisions reactively — based on what he read in the news rather than any considered framework. He had no particular method for distinguishing significant market shifts from noise.
Attended the market history programme in early 2024, followed by a first cycle of the almanac. By the third month of the almanac, he was writing more precisely about what he was observing versus what he was inferring.
"I make fewer decisions in a year now than I did before. That's probably the most significant change."
Jirawee, 47, was approaching a decision about early retirement with her husband. They had different ideas about what careful preparation meant and found it difficult to discuss the topic without it becoming an argument about values rather than a conversation about options.
Attended The Households of Friends alone. The workshop's framework for discussing other households gave her a vocabulary she brought back into conversations with her husband — they could now refer to "the kind of household" they wanted to be, rather than arguing about specific numbers.
"I didn't expect it to help our conversations at home. It did. We're not in agreement yet, but we're having different conversations."
A physician at 58, Boonsong felt well-informed about financial products but uncertain how to integrate what he read into a coherent view of his long-term situation. He could read a prospectus but wasn't confident he was placing it in adequate historical context.
Completed a full almanac cycle, keeping detailed monthly observations. By the end, he described having a better-developed sense of what kind of information to weight and what to set aside when making financial judgements.
"Six months of written observation made me notice how much of my previous thinking was just reacting to the most recent thing I had read."
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