A perennial temptation for investors is the urge to quit the market at the top and to get back in at the bottom. While the lure of market timing sells millions of books and is standard fodder for financial TV shows, the reality rarely lives up to the promise.
The classic 2002 book ”When Genius Failed” tells the true story of a hedge fund, run by a supremely confident Wall Street bond dealer who with the help of two Nobel laureate economists thought he had cracked the code to make millions in the markets.
Have you noticed that everybody is an expert nowadays? Every opinion is deemed as valid as every other and people, at least in their own minds, quickly ascend to savant status on the basis of reading a feature article on their favourite topic.
It seems every time you open a newspaper, you’re bombarded with the often competing views of equity analysts, economists and other pundits about the right level for stocks, the likely winning and losing sectors and what policy changes might mean for the market.
Back in 2000, two psychologists published a study about jam. Sheena Lyengar and Mark Lepper wanted to know what happens when you give consumers more or less choice.
Regret. This single emotion has been cited by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman as probably the greatest enemy of good decision-making in personal finance.