My Dopamine determines risks of mine

dopamine molecule

Have you ever wondered why you can become revved up and an exuberant risk taker, when flying high, or hesitant and risk-adverse, when cowering from your losses in the stock market? We have the impression that it is our deliberative mind that makes the most important decisions in…

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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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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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Wanna be a trillionaire?

Sounds great, doesn’t it? And you would be the first on this planet, provided that you measure your wealth in the current USD, since I am quite certain that there would already be existent trillionaires when measured in Vietnamese Dong or Indonesian Rupiah. Trillions are flung around in the news nowadays to…

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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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The good ol’ gut feeling

We sometimes tend to think that ideas and feelings arising from our intuition are essentially superior to those achieved by reason and logic. As such, intuition—the good old “gut feeling”—has come to be idealized as the Noble Savage of the mind, fearlessly cutting through…

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Don’t get framed by …

… the Framing Bias.  This is another beautiful mental shortcut that we use to solve common problems. Although this heuristic speeds up processing in our brain, it occasionally makes us think so fast that we miss what is important. When heuristics work, they…

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