Market Performance
This goes some way to explaining why my domestic equities portfolio has been a little lacklustre. Could be worse I could be investing in UK stocks.
How Our Minds Mislead Us: The Marvels and Flaws of Our Intuition
Excellent little piece on how our brain tricks us repeatedly. If you want to characterize how something is done, then one of the most powerful ways of characterizing how the mind does anything is by looking at the errors that the mind produces while it’s doing it because the errors tell you what it is…
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And You Think Trading Is A Tough Gig…
During the course of his career, Mr. Needham said in a speech at the Academy Awards in 2012, he broke 56 bones, including his back twice. He punctured a lung, had a shoulder replaced and knocked out several teeth. He invented several new stunt methods and devices — among them the introduction of air bags…
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Are We There Yet?
Whilst travelling during the week I was asked by someone what is the single most practical thing a trader can do to give themselves an edge. The question has an easy answer – trade in the direction of the prevailing trend. As easy as it is most people ignore it completely and all fund managers…
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Interview With Richard Thaler
We are rational, self-interested optimizers: Homo economicus. So the neoclassical model of economics has held for over a century. It has been a fruitful model, at the heart of the discipline’s most profound theories, predictions and policy prescriptions. According to Richard Thaler, it is also flawed. Humans in the real world, Thaler points out, behave…
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Blue Chip Portfolio
There has been a bit of chatter on the Mentor forum about the philosophy of buying blue chip portfolios so I thought I would generate a simple table of the maximum drawdown experienced by each of the ASX 20 since 2000. As you can see the drawdowns are for the most part horrendous with…
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Do Investors Have Too Much Information?
This is the title of a CNN Money article. The issue is in many ways hidden by the title and the accepted belief that we live in an era where information overload is the default setting for any and all activities. Undoubtedly information overload is an issue for traders. This is a natural consequence of…
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The Neuroscience of Why Gratitude Makes Us Healthier
Ignore the airy fairy, crystal rubbing, tree hugging, knitted wool beanie feel of the site and concentrate on the message. In one study on gratitude, conducted by Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., at the University of California at Davis and his colleague Mike McCullough at the University of Miami, randomly assigned participants were given one of…
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