Category Archives: Trading Psychology

The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgement, by Charlie Munger

I have long been very interested in standard thinking errors. However, I was educated in an era wherein the contributions of non-patient-treating psychology to an understanding of misjudgment met little approval from members of the mainstream elite. Instead, interest in psychology was pretty well confined to a group of professors who talked and published mostly…

How Will Investors Behave in 2023?

Although many people do it, making forecasts about how financial markets will fare in 2023 is an entirely pointless endeavour. What we can predict with some confidence, however, is how investors will behave – that doesn’t change much. So, what will we all be doing in 2023? More here – Behavioural Investment

The Myth of the Secret Genius

If he’s super rich, he must be a super genius. That conclusion is a cognitive mistake many continue to make when they encounter a seemingly incongruous state of affairs, such as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, behaving like an irrational idiot. And yet, behave like an idiot he does, day after day, a public jester who…

The Science Of Peak Performance

Investment Bubbles and Frauds Have a Lot in Common

Expensive investor mistakes come in two forms. We can either lose money slowly or quickly. Slow losses are small and compound over time – largely unnoticed – growing into a major cost; these can be through high fees or persistent performance chasing. Rapid losses are far more dramatic and are often a result of us…

Big Beliefs

Most fields are a hierarchy of truths with big ideas at the top and laws, rules, and finer details branching off below them. Viewing ideas in isolation, without recognizing the family tree of where they came from, gives a distorted view of how a field works and can overcomplicate what are often simple answers. Beliefs…

Something Has to Hurt

In his new book on decision making, Ed Smith, who was responsible for the selection of the England Men’s cricket team between 2018 and 2021, discusses the challenges of innovative thinking.[i] He quotes poker player Caspar Berry: “Whenever someone innovates in business or in life, they almost inevitably do so by accepting a negative metric that…

Meet the Woman Teaching the Psychology of Survival

Kate Baecher and her mountaineering group were being guided over a dangerous traverse in Europe a few years ago when a climber in the party ahead of them fell hundreds of feet to her death. Baecher, a Sydney-based psychologist, military veteran, and avid mountaineer with a background helping people perform in high-stress situations, kept her cool…