Changed recommendations and rules of thumb: what changed

The entries here concern advice rather than law — the points at which the standard guidance given to long-term investors was revised, or should have been.

Cost is the theme that recurs. Zero-commission trading in the United States from October 2019 and Canada's 2022 ban on deferred sales charges and discount-broker trailing commissions removed two of the largest recurring drags on small portfolios. Once explicit commissions reach zero, the remaining costs are the fund expense ratio and the spread, and the ban on payment for order flow matters precisely because it moves cost between those two lines rather than eliminating it.

Disclosure changed what comparison is possible. The PRIIPs Key Information Document became mandatory for UCITS funds in January 2023, and ESMA's fund-naming guidelines took effect in November 2024 — the latter aimed at a specific bad habit, funds carrying an ESG label without the holdings to match.

The hardest lesson in this section is the Austrian one. The OeNB's 2023 analysis of real wealth losses during the inflation squeeze quantifies what two years of negative real rates did to conventional savings, and it is the strongest available argument against the advice, still widely given, to hold a large cash buffer indefinitely. The Canadian capital gains episode of 2024 and 2025 makes the opposite point about acting too fast: restructuring a portfolio ahead of an announced tax change that was later cancelled was itself the costly decision.