It’s that time of the year again

Planning Fallacy

It’s that time of the year again, when avalanches of New Year’s resolutions are launched with idealistic plans for drastic self-improvement in 2016. We resolve to quit drinking, smoking, or both.  We resolve to help others and to spend more time with our friends and…

Continue reading

Diversify, diversify, and then diversify some more

diversify diversify diversify

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…

Continue reading

A few thoughts on our second brain

Our Second brain and intuition

I can literally envision all you regular readers rolling your eyes at yet another “brainy” post and thinking: “Tacomob, haven’t you written more than enough about the brain already?  Isn’t there some other topic on your mind?” Of course there is, and that’s why I am…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading