Avoiding Bad Decisions
1. We’re unintentionally stupid We like to think that we can rationally process information like a computer, but we can’t. Cognitive biases explain why we made a bad decision but rarely help us avoid them in the first place. It’s better to focus on these warning signs that signal something is about to go wrong. Warning signs…
The Usefulness of Our Delusions
The story of Donald Lowry and the “Church of Love” is weird and captivating: a balding, middle-aged writer in a small Midwestern town had assumed the personas of dozens of fictitious women. He had written love letters in their voices to tens of thousands of men. Each woman had her own unique writing style, vocabulary…
Starting Dates Are Everything.
When reviewing the investment performance of any vehicle the picture you paint will depend upon the starting and finishing dates you select. This is an old trick of everyone from fund managers to financial planners to make something look really good. It is also sometimes used by journalists to make a rather tenuous point. This…
More Broker Whinging
More from Todays Age – The cynic in me really wants to suggest that the price retail investors will pay is that they may run into a broker who is able to pass an ethics test. Accreditation is a function of every industry but the financial sector has fought it at every step. In part,…
Headline Of The Day
From today’s Age. Brokers are apparently whinging about having to do a compliance (read competency) test to stay in the industry. Find me an industry that doesn’t require some form of test of competency to be in it. Some of the nation’s most prominent stockbroking firms are railing against a mandatory ethics test that has…
Following Instructions
On the 22nd of August 1985 British AirTours flight, 28M was sitting on the runway at Manchester Airport. Loaded with British budget holiday makers who were no doubt looking forward to their holiday in Corfu wherein the tradition of English tourists they would get legless most nights, complain a Greek Island didn’t have food like…
How Led Zeppelin Came to Be
On September 7th, 1968, Led Zeppelin played their first live show ever in, of all places, a converted gym in Gladsaxe, Denmark. They weren’t yet billed under their soon-to-be world-famous name but were instead performing under the guise of the New Yardbirds, a relaunch of the British Invasion blues rockers who’d imploded just months before. The only…
The Importance of Outliers
One of the mistakes that new traders make is they hold the belief that the market will give them a salary much the same as any other employer would. When in fact the reality is very different – returns from markets are very lumpy and in part, I think it is this staccato nature of…
2020: A Recap of My 1270%, $18.2 million trading year.
This piece dropped into my Twitter feed courtesy of Steven Goldsmith who runs the AlphaMind podcast. You don’t need to be on Twitter to read the thread just hit the link and it should open. What interested me about this thread were the comments as they display the dichotomy that exists within Twitter and by…
