Have you ever been convinced that you could predict how well you would perform in any stock market situation? If the answer is yes, then you are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. What that effect literally means is that you are so bad at a…
Schwager takes aim at the most perniciously pervasive academic precepts, money management canards, market myths, and investor errors. Like so many ducks in a shooting gallery, Schwager picks them off, one at a time, revealing the truth about many of…
The tendency to find order to ambiguous stimuli is built into the cognitive machinery we use to understand the world. That predisposition to impose order can be so automatic and so unchecked that we often end up believing in the…
Two main subjects: Why markets for goods and services tend toward equilibrium, but financial markets do not. Why central banks are useful and what they should do (which they currently don’t). Breaking the 170 page book into nine chapters, Cooper…
The other day, an ex-colleague asked me to point him to some trading books that would teach him to get rich. I was cracking my head for some wisdom that could help him with in his journey as trader. After a while,…
This is clinging to a fact or figure that should have no bearing on your decision. Often, we use an initial value or first piece of informationa as a “starting point” in decision making. Even if the initial value was…
“The Moon is made of green cheese.” While we might like to believe that we are all perfectly rational, reality is far different. Unfortunately, we tend to be susceptible to the manipulative messages that the financial industry and the popular…
Also known as the “I knew it all along” effect. Hindsight bias refers to our tendency to take facts now known and interpret them in a way that explains past events. In retrospect everything seems clear and inevitable. This is a…
A close relative to the previously mentioned Confirmation Bias, Overconfidence is the tendency to overestimate our own abilities (i.e., we aren’t as smart as we think we are). We tend to think that we are much better forecasters and estimators than we…
We let confirmation bias take control of our mind by only seeking out information from sources that agree with our pre-existing beliefs. Conversely, we tend to ignore and dismiss information (= disconfirming evidence) which tend to disprove our initial impressions. It’s the tendency to interpret the glass…