Marilyn Cole: It's time to change the narrative on long-term investing

We live in a news-obsessed world - and that applies as much to investment markets as everything else. Not content with a year that saw the US president pursue an aggressive trade policy on Twitter and threaten the job security of the Federal Reserve chairman on the same platform, just before Christmas we saw perhaps the strangest story of the lot. If we did not know before now, mere phone calls to the bosses of big banks - even calls from the US Treasury secretary - do not settle nervous markets. Nor does it persuade bearish investors to become bulls. In fact, despite Treasury secretary ...