You might have noticed that in recent weeks the sharemarket has taken something of a battering. This happens from time to time, and the more mature one becomes, the more it feels like we’ve seen all of this before. It’s still a bit unpleasant, though, to see prices of the shares you and your adviser so carefully picked falling just like all the others.

But when I picked up the phone my adviser seemed remarkably upbeat. She wasn’t encouraging me to sell, and she wasn’t encouraging me to buy more. She was checking in, as the young people say, to answer any questions and to offer her professional judgement on any thoughts I might have. In other words, she was doing the job of a true adviser, rather than that of a salesperson.

This is a refreshing change. I well remember Lamborghini Boy calling me during the week of a market rout some years ago to encourage me to tip more money into my share portfolio. Thinking he could press my buttons by talking to me about cars (not an unreasonable assumption) he asked: If that car you have your eye on falls 15 per cent in price, would you be more inclined to buy it, or would you wait until it was expensive again and then buy it?

It’s a superficially attractive concept – but he was a superficially attractive man, but it took me time to work that out. If the value of my investments fell – if I sold some, or if the market fell – then he got paid less. So he didn’t ever want me to sell, and from time to time he’d be wanting me to buy more, to top-up my portfolio, so he didn’t lose income. He hated it when I bought another car, because he hadn’t worked out how he could charge me a fee based on the value of a McLaren.