Performing under pressure?

The world can often feel like a pressure cooker.  Politics has divided the world, social media has amplified division and impartial investigative journalism is both in short supply, overwhelmed and silenced. A timely reminder of the significance of choices and their consequences has arrived at cinemas. Pressure is the “untold story” of some of the events leading to the D-Day landings, an event, which we all know, marked the turning point in the war against Nazi Germany.

I’m going to draw some thoughts about the film and here is where any sensible person would heed a “spoiler warning” but one of the major achievements of the film is that it is surprisingly gripping when you consider that we all know the outcome and result before the opening titles have begun.

The film is familiar ground and we are re-introduced to a different type of D-Day hero – James Stagg CB, OBE, FRSE who is called upon to act as chief meteorologist for Eisenhower in his preparation for D-Day. At its core there is a battle between what we want to believe and what we need to know. A conflict, but one where competing arguments have potentially vastly different consequences. Stagg and his “opponent” the American, Irving Krick contested the forecast, with Eisenhower finally being persuaded by Stagg that a delay to the invasion would be wise.

Unfortunately we do need to remember that film is a genre and often shorthand, this is not a documentary. Whilst Stagg was head of the team, it was actually the Norwegian, Sverre Petterssen who noted the inbound storms that contradicted Krick’s forecast.

The main contention was that the Americans, who prior to the war, had been unusually successful in weather forecasts and had monetised this successfully, and… well money talks. Their methods were primarily using data to search for patterns and how they appear to repeat. Stagg and Petterssen were unimpressed by their pseudo-scientific approach. They used data, historic and current and sought nuance in context acknowledging that any forecast is not certain. The main point here is that Eisenhower had to take a leap of faith in a forecast that was not certain and contradictory to what he wanted to hear.

This is where the financial planning bit begins – humans like patterns. We look for reassurance in them. We often use terms like “history repeats itself”. We get comfort from notions like “success breeds success” and we certainly appear to believe that those who have amassed vast fortunes must have some special talent that the rest of us lack.

Your financial plan is a “best guess”; it is not a certainty. We do not know the future. Many years ago I bought a crystal ball as a prop to joke that it doesn’t work, designed to bring some levity to the task of forecasting, but I’ve never actually got it off the shelf for a meeting. Instead, at times I have used data, graphics and charts. You may have seen them (hopefully) and note that often it depends on the time we have together and the content and direction of our discussion. I will regularly show a chart of the world stock market with a lot of noted disastrous events over the last 100 years, yet the long-term trend of markets is relentlessly upwards.

Sometimes I use the “best performing markets” which often looks like a patchwork quilt – the pattern is that there is no pattern. Anyone who attempts to predict which assets, markets or sectors will be “top performers” next year is confronted by the data that tells us that this is extremely difficult to get right once, let alone repeat and those who do will not find comfort in the data from Standard and Poors which shows that the longer term success of investors outperforming the market is little more than luck – mathematically.

Enormous financial services companies, the Investment Banks with billions under management, give the impression that they have some special insight into the future. They employ very clever people with excellent credentials. They may have a reasonable amount of success and are well remunerated for it, but in the end, it’s mathematically inevitable that their outperformance reverts to mean (average) due to their weighted “bets” on sectors, companies etc. Big banks can charge big fees for their apparent success and it’s worth noting that our meteorologist Krick was an accomplished salesman for his services in California prior to the war.

We want to believe that some people have special insight. In reality, certainly in the business world and financial one in particular, that insight is often gained through questionable means. Information is deemed an advantage, and it can be, particularly if you pay $100,000 a month for a pre-leased feed of tweets before they are “officially” released by the most corrupt US administration to exist. A small advantage can be used to advantage, particularly in a rigged system.

Investors look for patterns in markets and stock prices, we often refer to events that help justify our beliefs (typically great crashes). Your financial plan is designed for your lifetime – hopefully decades, so the short-term challenges are really a blip on the charts. However, that truth doesn’t really comfort the reality of living through storms and attempts to predict, prepare and plan for them. As investors, we cannot control the metaphorical weather, we can merely control our responses.

So advisers and investors differ in their beliefs and it’s important to acknowledge this. Some will be convincing that short term advantages can be captured, that they have a system and process to do so and that it is reliable and repeatable. A lot (and I do mean a lot) of money is at stake and spent trying to persuade you that they do know best; that their crystal ball really does work. The long-term evidence does not support this view. What it does evidence is that a lot of people want to believe comforting stories that make the storyteller much richer, bigger, more successful, which in itself is evidence of their “wisdom”. To quote the James Stagg of the film “we must face the facts, however frightening they may be”.

The fact that your plan is a very good educated guess, does not mean it’s worthless, quite the opposite, but I hope that you will appreciate that we aren’t merely providing a forecast and leaving you to negotiate the stomach churning crossing to France, the Nazi machine guns and mines on the beaches and the assault on Hitler’s forces. We plan enormous importance of reviewing progress and keeping updated on the unfolding action (your circumstances and the real challenges).

Forecasting is incredibly difficult and even the appearance of success may have more to do with luck, which is why evidence is so important as well as proper regular reviews. We all want to live in a world of good news, but the truth is that the news we don’t want to hear is invariably the information we really need. Yes it does come with pressure.

I thoroughly enjoyed the film, Andrew Scott is typically great as is Brendan Fraser and watch out for Kerry Condon. Here is the official trailer.

Pressure (2026) , Directed by Anthony Maras, Starring Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser. Produced by Working Title Films

References:

Pressure (2026): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32547691/

Sverre Petterssen forecast: https://journal.meteohistory.org/index.php/hom/article/view/15

Contentious history of D-Day forecasting: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160932704000511

National Archives: Operation Overlord: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/explore-by-time-period/second-world-war/operation-overlord-and-d-day/

Irving Krick: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/78/2/1520-0477-78_2_278.pdf

BBC interview (1964) with James Stagg: https://www.bbc.co.uk/videos/cp30qwdpe04o

S&P underperformance metrics: https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/research-insights/spiva/

The patchwork quilt of market returns: https://novelinvestor.com/asset-class-sector-and-global-market-quilts-updated-for-2025/

Trump $100,000 advanced feed: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/trump-media-pitched-100000-monthly-fee-fast-feed-us-presidents-posts-ft-reports-2026-07-17/

What we do: https://www.solomonsifa.co.uk/what-we-do/