Knowing the average return of a particular investment region, asset class or strategy only helps you in a minor part of your planning. But many of you tend to overemphasize on average returns so much that, the culprit of an overconfident and less conservative plan might be yourself. Joe Wiggins, who currently work as Director of Research at St James Place and author of the book The Intelligent Fund Investor wrote a good piece about this concept call Ergodicity. Ergodicity is very related to the topic that average return can mislead your investment decision-making easily. The main idea behind ergodicity is that there is a difference between:

1. The average result produced by a group of people carrying out an activity and
2. The average result of an individual doing the same thing through time

Here are a few things if there is a difference:

1. One number is bigger than the other.

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