Every day we see reports on how share markets are performing. It's easy to get concerned about our investments if we hear "The market fell today" on the evening news!
But exactly what is "the market?" The ASX, the FTSE, Dow Jones – they are all indexes that average the performance of a very large number of companies. Within a share market, individual companies can perform very differently to the average.
Professional investment managers aim to choose companies that will perform well in the long-term, whatever the short-term performance of the overall share market.