Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week, I explain TACO investing and look back on a week of training for my new job.
Weekly Update
I started my training for my new self-employed venture this week. I’m still a mortgage and protection advisor, but I’m now working for myself under a brokerage. This means my leads, systems, compliance, and admin are all provided. However, I will not have a salary and will be working purely on commission.
I’m not really worried by this because, and I don’t mean to sound arrogant here, I generally have a great relationship with the people I help with their mortgages. Back at Lloyds, I had many customers who would contact me directly to review their arrangements every so often, and even from my last job at IMH, I’ve had several people reach out to me directly, stating that I’d helped their friend or family member, and they wanted to refer them on to me.
From time to time, everyone will complain about their job, but in all seriousness, I actually do enjoy helping people with their mortgages. It’s a stressful thing for many families, and knowing that I’ve helped in some small way is a great feeling, more so when they remember you and come back to you every couple of years.
When I worked at Lloyds, I had many customers like this who, over the course of a decade, I was there to help them along. What was also a real boost was that they often remembered snippets from our conversations, asking about holidays we’d talked about, or films and books we’d discussed. I really enjoy that element of the job.
The training I had this week ended up being a positive experience. In the middle of the week, I was extremely stressed out as I didn’t think I was getting the new systems. However, once I’d slept on it and asked the trainer for a few minutes to clarify some points, it all dropped into place, and I smashed the final assessment.
Eating Out
I wrote recently about an annoying experience we had at Psalter in Sheffield. Well, we’ve gone to the other end of the spectrum this week with Kapital. Truth be told, we have eaten there twice in the last couple of weeks, and both times the food and service have been fantastic. It’s not fine dining, or even claiming to be fine dining. It’s German beer hall style food, and it’s very well done.
They do this warm pretzel that is served with mustard, pickled vegetables, and sauerkraut, and it’s tasty and comforting. Last time we dined there, I had the burger with two beef patties, bacon, cheese, pickles, sauerkraut, and currywurst mayo. It was the best burger I’ve eaten in Sheffield. Oana had the goulash, and for dessert, we had apple strudel, which was incredibly good and would not be out of place in any restaurant.
On Saturday, we went for pizza with my Dad, who has not been well for a few weeks. Pizza Express had an offer where you could order one pizza and get another for £1. We like the Romana base for our pizzas, and there was a small surcharge for this, but it was still a great offer. So, we basically shared four large pizzas between the three of us. Piggish? Yes. Would I do it again? Also, yes.
Cabbagegate
With my Dad not having been well, Oana and I have done a few shopping runs for him on our bikes. On our most recent trip, we had his shopping and ours in our panniers. After handing over his shopping, we tried to exit the apartment complex via the gate, which is only wide enough for one bike at a time. Oana went first and then propped up her bike to hold the gate open for me (I had held it for her to exit first before getting on my bike).
Anyway, her bike toppled over, crushing one of the panniers that had a couple of jars of pickled cabbage. One of the jars broke, spilling the pickled cabbage and the pickle juice all over the inside of a brand-new pannier that was having its first use.
The smell of pickled cabbage is surprisingly difficult to get out of a pannier that is not suitable for a washing machine. So yeah, that happened.
What I’m Doing
Listening: Ragnarok: Chess Team Book 4 by Jeremy Robinson and Kane Gilmour.
Watching: Spartacus (Netflix).
Reading: The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko by Derek Tyler Attico.
We’ve been having a lot of fun watching Spartacus on Netflix. I’ve seen it loads of times over the years. The language is hilarious, and the fight scenes are entertaining. All that aside, it’s a pretty good story if you can excuse some questionable CGI and the array of Australian and New Zealand accents.
Anyway, throughout the week, I’ve been asking ChatGPT to reword my messages to Oana and family as if they were written by someone from the show. I was getting frustrated by Poppy coming in and out of my office several times an hour during training. Below is an example of some of the messages:
By the gods, this house has become a theatre of repeated torment.
Poppy stations herself at my office door and unleashes a yowl fit to summon legions, demanding entry as though denied her rightful dominion. I relent — because I am weak, and because I love her.
No sooner does she cross the threshold than the cries begin anew. Now she demands freedom. The door must open again. Honour compels obedience.
And so the cycle repeats. In. Out. In. Out. A ceaseless march of noise and indignation, as if I am not master of my work, but keeper of the gate to feline whims.
Know this — my affection for her is vast, unyielding, and unquestioned. But by Jupiter’s swollen arse, the frustration gnaws at my soul like a gladiator denied wine and women.
I endure. I always endure.
And…
I am convinced this is no accident, but war.
Poppy yowls at the door not from need, but from calculation. She demands entry, waits only long enough to taste victory, then turns and screams for release — eyes alight with the knowledge that I will obey.
This is not confusion. This is strategy. A slow, deliberate breaking of spirit.
She knows I adore her. She wields this truth like a blade, carving away sanity one demand at a time. In. Out. In. Out. Each command answered, each shred of dignity surrendered.
Let the record show: I would die for this cat without hesitation.
But by the gods, she laughs at me.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £128,579.93.
Fuck It Fund: £1.61.
Pensions: £114,629.39.
Residential Property Value: £243,430.00.
Total Assets: £509,640.93.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £174,692.83.
Total Debts: £174,692.83.
Total Wealth: £334,948.10.
I’m delighted to have made it to this point without having to cash in any investments, having left my last job in October.
TACO Investing
There’s something a little grotesque about the idea of TACO investing once you stop laughing at the acronym.
At first glance, it sounds like gallows humour from traders who’ve seen the same film too many times. An unhinged or otherwise batshit crazy announcement from Donald Trump rattles markets. Screens glow red. Pundits shout. Retail investors panic. Then, almost on cue, the threat is softened, delayed, rebranded, or quietly shelved. Markets rebound. Those who “knew the pattern” pat themselves on the back and bank the gains. MAGA supporters shout out about the “Art of the Deal.”
For those of us who are not completely stupid, a familiar pattern starts to emerge;
Trump Always Chickens Out.
It’s funny until you look at who’s actually paying the price for the joke.
TACO investing isn’t really about clever insight or behavioural finance theory. It’s about trying to arbitrage a single man’s temperament. It’s a bet that bluster will outweigh conviction, that ego will trump consequences, and that the market will be allowed to calm down before anything genuinely irreversible happens. And that’s a hell of a thing to build an investment strategy around.
The danger is obvious, even if people pretend otherwise. Patterns only exist until they don’t. The moment someone assumes the threat is always empty is the moment the threat becomes most dangerous. All it takes is one instance where the follow-through actually happens, one tariff that sticks, one policy that isn’t walked back, one institutional norm that really is broken, and the entire logic collapses.
The people who thought they were being contrarian geniuses suddenly discover they were just standing in front of a moving train, trusting it would swerve like it always had before.
And it’s not just traders playing games with their own money. This is where it tips from reckless to morally repellent.
Markets don’t exist in a vacuum. Every wild swing triggered by a presidential mood affects pensions, ISAs, workplace schemes, insurance funds, and long-term savers who never opted into this absurd casino. Ordinary people trying to quietly build financial security, often through nothing more exotic than global index funds, end up whiplashed by the ego-driven theatrics of one man-child who knows full well that markets respond to his words.
That’s the truly ugly part. It isn’t accidental, and it isn’t a side effect. It’s leverage, it’s a feature, and not a bug.
When a president understands that a single sentence can erase or create hundreds of billions in market value, and uses that power casually, performatively, or strategically, it stops being “tough negotiating” and starts looking like market manipulation by proxy. A select few, such as those fast enough, informed enough, or connected enough, can exploit the volatility. Everyone else just absorbs the shock, and wealth continues to be transferred from the masses to the select few.
The cruelty lies in the asymmetry. Those at the top can frame chaos as strength and retreat as victory, while those at the bottom are told volatility is just “the cost of investing”. It’s not bravery. It’s not leadership.
And for individual investors tempted by TACO logic, there’s a quieter danger too. It trains you to think short-term. It nudges you away from fundamentals and towards personality-watching. You stop asking what assets are worth and start asking how likely someone is to blink. That’s not investing and is just gambling. If you don’t understand it, it’s always gambling.
Long-term wealth is built on boring things: time, diversification, discipline, and patience. TACO investing asks you to abandon all of that in favour of timing political mood swings. Even when it “works”, it corrodes good habits. When it fails, it does so suddenly and brutally.
Perhaps the most damning thing about TACO investing is that it normalises the idea that this is just how the world works now. That the markets should flinch every time a powerful man posts, speaks, or performs outrage. That billions of people should accept instability as entertainment for the powerful and an opportunity for the already-wealthy.
It shouldn’t be normal. And it certainly shouldn’t be shrugged off as clever.
Because when one individual can toy with the financial lives of millions and others rush in to monetise the tremors, it isn’t a savvy investing culture. It’s just a symptom of something badly broken in our society, and with our leaders.
What about Greenland?
Coming straight off the back of TACO investing, the Greenland episode feels less like a surprise and more like the latest case study in the same grim pattern: maximalist threat, market and diplomatic shock, followed by a carefully stage-managed retreat dressed up as triumph.
After all the noise about tariffs, sovereignty, and America’s “strategic necessity” to control the Arctic, what actually happened? The United States ended up with the same rights it already had. Let’s unpack it…
The Trump administration declared the United States had “secured access”, “guaranteed cooperation”, and “protected its strategic interests”. Except it already had all of those things under long-standing agreements with Denmark. The ability to move forces, operate bases, and cooperate on defence in Greenland didn’t emerge from this crisis; it pre-dated it by decades. Nothing changed except that the United States’ reputation on the international stage was tarnished yet again.
This is where the Greenland fiasco slots perfectly into the TACO investing mindset. Just as markets have learned to discount Trump’s threats because of his tendency to back down, so too did allies treat this episode as bluster rather than policy. And just like in markets, that adjustment only happened after damage was done.
For investors who fancy themselves clever enough to play this pattern, Greenland is also a warning label. It reinforces the illusion that you can reliably arbitrage one man’s temperament. That you can safely assume escalation is performative and retreat is inevitable. But every time that assumption holds, it also raises the stakes for the time it doesn’t. If you build your strategy on the belief that someone will always blink, you’re eventually standing there when they don’t, whether through miscalculation, ego, or sheer stubbornness.
Morally, though, the Greenland episode is even uglier than the trading logic behind it.
This wasn’t just a market-moving tweet or a tariff threat. It involved the sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity of a population being treated as a geopolitical bargaining chip. Greenlanders were discussed as assets. Their land as inventory. Their future as leverage. All so a powerful man could posture, provoke, and then retreat while claiming a win that never actually materialised.
The man is so fucking stupid and so irredeemable that he could arguably be the biggest danger to global peace. That’s the part that should make people deeply uncomfortable. The guy is willing to threaten armed conflict just to earn a few more dollars.
Greenland shows the full arc of Trump Always Chickening Out: the reckless opening move, the destabilisation, the quiet reversal, and the victory lap taken on ground that never shifted. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of setting fire to a room, extinguishing it yourself, and then demanding applause for heroism.
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, nor should they be considered advice.
If you want personalised financial advice, seek an appropriate professional. If you are in financial difficulty, seek advice via the resources below:
Biolink
You can now find all my social media pages by checking out my Biolink:
bio.link/davidscothern.