Caroline Ritchie: Dependable, reliable, boring

Young boys happily pedal Christmas bikes two years too big for them along the promenades. Hot salt breeze, surf spray tang on the tongue and, finally, we have our taste of New Zealand summer. Investment appetite has also been whetted with a positive start to the calendar year in all major markets.

Roubini and other famous naysayers are temporarily pushed to one side, though not forgotten. Volumes are small, it's true, but the valuations behind them still pitch themselves as attractive and have propped up a cautious January rally, notwithstanding the various European downgrades over the weekend.

Positivity, well due. It's tentative. Having been here before, in a market where sheer force of will propels a recovery, investors need to now look to the solid and reliable.

Tentative is the new silver lining, but reliable remains your bread and butter. Reliable companies run the gauntlet from the boringly mundane to the fantastically intuitive - tissues and toilet paper or closed architecture operating systems. Doesn't matter as long they deliver the goodies on time and in full. Reliability, like its forefather innovation, will be the new mantra to which equity investors gravitate.

Forward planning, exhibited by the Mum, who bought the bicycle with room to grow on the frame, should be given equal status with dependability selection. An impossible combination? Not quite. Look around you.

The products you cannot do without or replicate yourself are stacked everywhere. Most of these are made by big foreign multinationals.

Sure, a smattering of locality exists, but facts are facts.

The international disposable paper barons and the providers of the things without which modern life would not be worth living will become the new market patriarchs. And my-oh-my they sure know how to arrange things.

But the causality of their predicted dominance is partly perseverance, part timing. Worldly uncertainty brings home common truths about the essential versus the luxurious.

The language of indulgence is a mute voice: something to bathe in later on when times are good. For now, we want dependable.

More than anything investors want to know where they stand.

What's what in a crazy market. Dependable, reliable investments, and if boring, who cares? It's the new black.

Caroline Ritchie is an authorised financial adviser with Forsyth Barr in Napier. To contact an investment adviser call 0800 367 227. This column is general in nature and should not be regarded as personalised investment advice. Disclosure statements are available on request and free of charge.