2022: A Year Of Snakes And Ladders

Investors should stop thinking of what could go wrong and focus on what they can map with some degree of confidence

- Udayan Mukherjee

A year of living dangerously, in every sense of the term, draws to a close. Lives lost, businesses shuttered, human resolve tested, yet wealth created. A year when science answered the questions asked of it, even as it prepares now for a sterner examination. These are times of great uncertainty yet investors appear sanguine that as long as they know the cause of uncertainty it cannot rock their boat, at least not enough to hurt. Secure, they remain, in the knowledge that the warden, who has the power to turn off the music, remains trapped in her own policy tower, for fear the revellers could burn the whole castle down were their party interrupted. This is how investors enter the new year, dancing wildly on a lake of frozen ice, drunk on the unexpected booty of the year gone by.

2022, then, has the prospect of a good game of snakes and ladders. The question is whether investors will still end up in the top corner of the board, despite encountering some fearsome anacondas on the way. They just might, for we are in a bull market, after all, which is meant to climb the ladders, giving snakes the slip.