Ridiculous as our market volatility might seem to an intelligent Martian, it is our reality and everyone loves to trot out the 'quote' attributed to Keynes (but never documented): 'The market can stay irrational longer than the investor can stay solvent.' For us agents, he might better have said 'The market can stay irrational longer than the client can stay patient.'

Capitalism believes that its remit is exclusively to make maximum short-term profits.

By background I'm both a Quaker and a Yorkshireman, which I like to call double jeopardy.

Profit margins are probably the most mean-reverting series in finance, and if profit margins do not mean-revert, then something has gone badly wrong with capitalism. If high profits do not attract competition, there is something wrong with the system and it is not functioning properly.

Market timing, by the way, is a tag some buy-and-hold investors use to put down anything that involves using your brain. These are the same people who like to watch the locomotive coming and get run down in the name of discipline.

I would say that financial markets are very inefficient, and capable of extremes of being completely dysfunctional.

Although value is a weak force in any single year, it becomes a monster over several years. Like gravity, it slowly wears down the opposition.