A few months ago I was in Paris celebrating the High Jewellery launch of Fascinating Egypt, so all things Egyptian have been on my mind. Between the scarabs, the goldwork and the hieroglyphs, my time with Van Cleef & Arpels, the Maison behind the collection, left me thoroughly buried in Egyptian wonders of technique.
Last weekend I was trying to shift a rug that had seen better days, out from under a heavy coffee table. I had a new rug to replace it, but no one around to help lift. Anyone who’s tried this knows the problem: you can’t just pick the thing up and hope for the best. It was beyond me to do that. So I found myself muttering out loud to an empty room: “Think like an Egyptian.” Drag it. Lever it. Slide it. Don’t fight the weight, work with it.
It worked! A rolled-up section of the old rug became a slider. A broom handle became a lever. Small, deliberate movements did the job. And somewhere between shifting that table three centimetres at a time, it struck me: the people who built the pyramids didn’t have cranes, trucks or hydraulics. They had ramps, levers, rollers, teamwork and extraordinary patience. They also happened to be some of the best mathematicians and astronomers the ancient world produced. They ruled the world as it was then known, and they did it with brains and technique.
These thoughts did drive me to finish the job, and it was satisfying. But they also got me thinking about investing. Because if there’s one thing markets reward, it’s the Egyptian approach. And one thing they punish is brute force.
So, here are my thoughts on learning about investing, Egyptian-style.
Start with leverage. While a lever lets you move something heavy with a fraction of the effort, get the fulcrum in the wrong place or push too hard, and it snaps back on you. Financial leverage, borrowing to invest, works the same way. Used with care it can move your wealth further than your own capital ever could. Used carelessly, it’s how people lose the coffee table, the rug and the room. The lever’s not the problem. Where you place it is.
Then there’s the maths. The Egyptians weren’t guessing when they aligned the Great Pyramid to true north with an accuracy modern surveyors admire. They measured, calculated, and checked their ratios obsessively before they moved a stone. Japan has a similar approach: measure twice, cut once. Investors who skip that step and buy on a tip over a BBQ instead of checking the price-to-earnings ratio, the debt levels and the actual numbers, are building on sand. Always do the maths first.
Consider the ramp and the roller. Neither one moves a two-tonne block on its own. But stacked together, a bit at a time, they shift the immovable. That’s diversification and dollar-cost averaging: no single tool does all the work, and no fortune is built by trying to move the whole block in one afternoon. You do it three centimetres at a time, consistently, over a very long period.
And then there’s patience. The Egyptians had that virtue in a quantity modern investors could learn from. The pyramids took decades. Compounding works the same way: it looks like nothing is happening for years, right up until it obviously is. The investors who ‘panic’ sell at the first wobble are the ones trying to finish the pyramid in an afternoon. It was never going to work that way, for them or for Khufu.
There’s a reason the pyramids are still standing four and a half thousand years later. They were built to last and left for someone else to inherit. That’s a good description of a well-built portfolio.
So next time the market (or coffee table) feels too heavy to move, don’t push. Get the lever in the right place, do the maths, take it in small steady stages, and give it time. Think like an Egyptian. It got a civilisation through 3,000 years. It might get your portfolio through the next thirty.
