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Gold coins sit on display at the Sharps Pixley Ltd showroom in London on Jan. 11. Gold is hot in the markets again, a symptom of how turbulent they have become, says Tim Kildaze.Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

This unending turbulence has finally beat me into submission. I may never understand why we've embraced wild markets that whipsaw back and forth, but I have come to accept that fighting our irrational groupthink is futile. We seem to like being silly, even when our retirement savings are at the whim of the wind.

Who else remembers when Brazil was touted as a new nirvana, chock full of hot investment ideas? Or when the shale oil and gas boom was supposedly unending? Or when the world was supposed to fall apart after the United States lost its Triple-A rating? The fervour with which investors reacted was on almost unimaginable levels.

The fact that so many people buy into hype – even supposedly smart institutional money managers – isn't all that surprising. Investors are always looking for the next great trade. FOMO (fear of missing out) is more than just millennial slang; it's a very powerful psychological effect.

What continually shocks me is the rate at which we pile in – and then, of course, pull out when the cracks emerge. Over a three-week span around the time the United States lost its Triple-A rating in 2011, the S&P/TSX Composite Index plummeted 14 per cent, and then climbed 9 per cent. We're like little kids playing Timbits soccer, forming a pack around the ball with our heads down.

It never seems to end, either. Somehow we're clamouring for gold again, which means investors are willing to forget (or maybe have mentally blocked) how much pain the sector imposed on their savings over the past three years.

This wouldn't be such a problem if chasing one dumb idea after the other hurt only those playing the game. But in a globalized world, money flows move at such rapid speeds that it can be destabilizing. See what happened the first week after Britain voted to leave the European Union for proof.

This has a serious impact on deal flow. Sometimes that's a good thing. Gold miners starved for fresh cash have finally been able to finance in the past few months. There are also deleterious effects. In May, mortgage lender MCAP filed for a $275-million initial public offering. For the first few weeks of marketing, the orders piled up. The deal was starting to look like a slam dunk.

Then the Brexit vote happened and everything came to a standstill. Within a week, it was pulled altogether – a sad sign for the entire IPO market, which badly needed a win to reinstill some investor confidence before the fall, when more deals are expected to be rolled out.

Commodity companies overwhelmed with debt have also been forced to fix their balance sheets at rapid speed, raising equity at depressing prices. Even when they do, it still might not do the trick, because investors collectively grow too terrified to touch them again. Both Cenovus and Encana raised more than $1-billion each in early 2015 to reduce leverage; both are now trading below the new issue prices for these deals.

Even more shocking, money flows can hold central banks hostage. It is incredible how much emphasis is put on what words U.S. Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen says or doesn't say on days like Wednesday, when the Fed makes its rate decisions. The threat of forceful outflows, such as when the bond market collapsed in May, 2013, when investors started to fear a hike, has forced central banks to prevent it from happening again.

Think about that. We still obsess over the potential of a 25-basis-point rate hike nine years after the global financial crisis started. What a time to be alive.

We've been warned that this would continue. Allianz's chief economic adviser, Mohamed El-Erian, argued in January that market volatility would be a major theme in 2016 – his comments coming as investors panicked about the potential of a Chinese economy slowdown first thing in the new year.

That doesn't make it any easier to swallow. Our collective stupidity only puts everyone on edge, so much so that whenever a financing window opens for companies to raise cash, they feel the need to rush to get deals done. Because who knows how long it will be open for?

For investors, it's possibly all of this is reshaping the philosophy behind their money-management strategies. The more time passes, the more it seems they have to choose between two streams. Either they play the short game and ride the waves, hoping they have expert timing before the inevitable crash comes, or they have got to be in it for the long haul.

And other than pension funds, who can really afford to do the latter these days?

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