Hot-cold-empathy gap

Have you ever asked yourself this: How can I control myself when I feel the irresistible need to break my rules about how to invest in the stock market? That question pertains to the “hot-cold-empathy gap”, where we say to ourselves in a calm…

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Neglect of prior base rates effect

tomorrow starts now; start an ETF savings plan

This is the tendency to fail to incorporate prior known probabilities which are pertinent to the decision at hand. Caution: Don’t read on if you are 40 years of age and above! Here’s an interesting question for the rest of you: Why aren’t more young people…

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conformity bias

Have you noticed that we are social creatures who devote a lot of our time to thinking about social ranking? And that a by-product of this obsession is a tendency to blindly trust the claims and ideas of people who rank…

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Do you want to predict the future?

I beg your pardon? Did you just answer with a Yes? That is great, because that proves that you are human and/or a human being. Did you know that the human being is the only animal that thinks about the future? We—human beings—think about the future…

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Unpredictability Ignorance

It’s not so easy to be active in the stock market. Because when people I meet learn that I make my money predominantly from the abundant stock market, they—more often than not—flood me with questions on my prediction of the future trends and…

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Others are just like me

We have the tendency to overestimate the degree to which others agree with us; therein making this—tendency—just another of those predictable patterns of thought and behavior that lead us to draw incorrect conclusions. Psychologists call this the False Consensus Bias. Let me ask you: “Is agreeing…

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