At the CFA UK Annual Investment Conference 2026, the industry conceded something useful: the biggest obstacle to good investing is not information. It is behaviour.
The Professionals Just Admitted the Real Problem
Every so often an industry says something true about itself, usually by accident, and it is worth catching when it happens.
On 9 June 2026, CFA UK held its Annual Investment Conference at Convene, 200 Aldersgate, in London. This is a room full of chartered financial analysts, chief investment officers and asset owners. People who manage other people’s money for a living and who have access to every piece of data you can imagine. And one of the sessions on the agenda was about how they are still all human.
The Session That Should Interest You Most
Greg Davies, Head of Behavioural Finance at Oxford Risk, spoke about how technology, including artificial intelligence and large language models, helps people make decisions when in pursuit of greater wealth. The framing behind that session is the interesting part. The organisers noted that despite data being more visible and accessible than ever before, irrationality still appears in the investment landscape.
Sit with that for a moment. The professionals, with more data than any previous generation, are still holding sessions about why people, including themselves, keep making poor decisions.
This is the single most useful thing an ordinary investor can learn, and it is not a technical insight. It is a behavioural one. The gap between good outcomes and bad outcomes is very rarely an information gap. It is a gap in temperament. Selling in a panic, buying in a frenzy, checking a portfolio too often, abandoning a plan because a headline made you anxious. None of that is fixed by knowing more. It is fixed by behaving differently.
The Wider Picture
The conference framed itself around rising valuations, evolving technology and shifting geopolitical sands, with breakout sessions covering artificial intelligence, private markets, fixed income and sustainability.
The keynote came from Gillian Tett OBE, Editorial Board Member at the Financial Times and Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, who addressed how to view geopolitics through a long-term lens and adapt your mindset to thrive in an uncertain world. A chief investment officer panel featured Helen Jewell, CFA, International Chief Investment Officer for Equities at BlackRock, alongside Yves Choueifaty of Tobam, Tom Coutts of Baillie Gifford and Jason Hsu of Rayliant Global Advisors, discussing how to invest confidently in the current market.
An asset owner panel explored how institutions are rethinking portfolio resilience amid inflation, rate shifts and geopolitical shocks while balancing liquidity and long-term goals across public, private, and impact assets.
Strip away the job titles and the themes are recognisable. Everything costs more than it did. Nobody is confident about what comes next. Technology is changing the terrain faster than anyone can map it. These are not institutional problems. They are the same problems you are managing in a household budget, just with more zeros attached.
What I Take From It
The comfort in all this is not that the professionals have answers you do not. It is that they have the same questions.
The advantage they hold is process. They have a framework, a time horizon and an agreed set of rules that stop them acting on feeling. That is genuinely replicable at any scale. You do not need a Bloomberg terminal to decide in advance how much you will invest each month, what you own it for, and under what circumstances you would sell. Writing that down is behavioural finance in a practical form, and it costs nothing. It is also, as I have written before, the thing that makes change actually hold: Why Change Never Sticks, and How to Make It
Session recordings, including further material from the day, are published by CFA UK on its conference page. Much of it is written for practitioners, but the behavioural material translates to anyone with money and a temperament.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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