Greed or need?
A few days back I wrote about “Am I saving enough?” Thank you for all your comments. I am just afraid that those people with their benchmark savings ratios are not really representative of the regular guys. Could it be…
Category: Investing tips on how to fine-tune your existing investments
The Backfire Effect
We all have a preferential set of intuitions, feelings, and ideas. Less poetically characterized by the term “bias”. These little quirks in our thinking pose a challenge to our ability to weigh evidence accurately to arrive at truth. Bias is…
It happened again – Self-enhancing transmission bias
I caught myself again yesterday. I was having coffee with an ex-colleague of mine. Back from the phase in my life when I was doing my ‘corporate duty’. I do like to occasionally check in with my ex-colleagues to see…
How I learned about the stock markets – going way back in time
The other day I was reminiscing about two epiphanies that influenced my choices in life. So back in those days I wanted to be independent. And I figured the best means to independence is money. Not for the sake of…
The Ostrich Effect
I initially wanted to put off writing about this fallacy, but I cannot avoid it. Psychologists use this term to describe the decision to ignore dangerous or negative information by “burying” one’s head in the sand—like an ostrich—and hoping it would disappear. The…
Remember the App “FarmVille”? It’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy in action
Oops! Despite trying to understand more than 60 cognitive biases by writing about them, I just realized that I have yet to share anything about the “classic”—the Sunk Cost Fallacy. And although I have written about its sister biases Loss and Regret Aversion, they alone leave gaps…
Let’s regress to the mean together
…but before we do that, allow me to elaborate a bit on it. Regression to the Mean (RTM) is the tendency for trends to flip with the passage of time; it’s nature’s way of levelling the playing field. Most things on Earth revert to…
The single largest risk to investors in today’s markets
…is themselves. That’s right, the single largest risk to investors is themselves. By that, I, of course, mean the influence of human emotion and psychology in decision making. It seems quite clear to me that humans are uniquely wired incorrectly for long-term…
New year, new start, same old, but still the most accurate stock market forecast for 2016
At the beginning of each year, there’re many pundits, experts, self-proclaimed gurus, and other suspicious characters who’d like to sell you stuff predicting the directions of the Stock Markets. As I personally have ample years of experience in the Stock Markets…
Diversify, diversify, and then diversify some more
Could we both agree on the following notion? That, in the investment field, there is no one instrument that can perform all the time, and that there is no one who can say with certainty—in advance—which instrument would perform best. The future is uncertain and markets are random. As such, what Harry Markowitz…
tips on how to fine-tune your existing investments
The Backfire Effect
We all have a preferential set of intuitions, feelings, and ideas. Less poetically characterized by the term “bias”. These little quirks in our thinking pose a challenge to our ability to weigh evidence accurately to arrive at truth. Bias is…
It happened again – Self-enhancing transmission bias
I caught myself again yesterday. I was having coffee with an ex-colleague of mine. Back from the phase in my life when I was doing my ‘corporate duty’. I do like to occasionally check in with my ex-colleagues to see…
How I learned about the stock markets – going way back in time
The other day I was reminiscing about two epiphanies that influenced my choices in life. So back in those days I wanted to be independent. And I figured the best means to independence is money. Not for the sake of…
The Ostrich Effect
I initially wanted to put off writing about this fallacy, but I cannot avoid it. Psychologists use this term to describe the decision to ignore dangerous or negative information by “burying” one’s head in the sand—like an ostrich—and hoping it would disappear. The…
Remember the App “FarmVille”? It’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy in action
Oops! Despite trying to understand more than 60 cognitive biases by writing about them, I just realized that I have yet to share anything about the “classic”—the Sunk Cost Fallacy. And although I have written about its sister biases Loss and Regret Aversion, they alone leave gaps…
Let’s regress to the mean together
…but before we do that, allow me to elaborate a bit on it. Regression to the Mean (RTM) is the tendency for trends to flip with the passage of time; it’s nature’s way of levelling the playing field. Most things on Earth revert to…
The single largest risk to investors in today’s markets
…is themselves. That’s right, the single largest risk to investors is themselves. By that, I, of course, mean the influence of human emotion and psychology in decision making. It seems quite clear to me that humans are uniquely wired incorrectly for long-term…
New year, new start, same old, but still the most accurate stock market forecast for 2016
At the beginning of each year, there’re many pundits, experts, self-proclaimed gurus, and other suspicious characters who’d like to sell you stuff predicting the directions of the Stock Markets. As I personally have ample years of experience in the Stock Markets…
Diversify, diversify, and then diversify some more
Could we both agree on the following notion? That, in the investment field, there is no one instrument that can perform all the time, and that there is no one who can say with certainty—in advance—which instrument would perform best. The future is uncertain and markets are random. As such, what Harry Markowitz…