By Call Levels – bio below
The field of behavioral finance was validated when the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was awarded to psychologist Daniel Kahneman and experimental economist Vernon Smith. As much as people like to assume absolute rationality and objectivity (as does the Modern Portfolio Theory), actual market data shows the opposite. Behavioral finance observes and attempts to explain seemingly irrational behavior and predictable errors in financial investors.
An old Wall Street saying goes: Two factors move the market, greed and fear. Greed drives the market upwards, and fear moves the market downwards. CNN has a Fear & Greed Index based on the most recent market transactions that serves as an indication on market sentiment.
Intuitively, we all know to buy low and sell high, but we often do the opposite in practice. Before the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) hit bottom on March 5, 2009, it had dropped around 20% in 2008. In hindsight, it would have been the best time to buy but many investors were still selling. From their perspective, the market had been declining for more than a year and seemed to do so more and more rapidly. Fear was so overwhelming that even into 2012, individual investors were not buying stocks like they used to.
During times of economic turmoil, psychological biases of institutional investors are also exposed. They tend to become too reliant on their elaborate financial models, which lead to overconfidence (an issue that we will discuss later) and consequently excessive risk taking. In the case of the subprime mortgage crisis, many financial institutions would not realize that they had over leveraged themselves until it was too late.
Even the rational side of the brain yields consistent and predictable cognitive errors. Prospect theory, developed by by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, helps explain why these cognitive errors occur. Firstly, investors use reference points to frame their choices in terms of potential gains/losses. Secondly, investors value the gains/losses with an S-shaped function. The function is concave for gains, convex for losses, and steeper for losses than for gains. Thirdly, investors view each investment as an individual account instead of seeing all their investments as a whole.
Behavioral Finance
Another approach to investment psychology is to categorize behavioral biases by source: self-deception, heuristic simplification, and mood. Prospect theory is considered a manifestation of heuristic simplification. Here are 8 more sources of irrational investment behavior, as discovered by various behaviorists:
Overconfidence
Overconfidence can lead investors to excessive trading and risk taking. There are two aspects of overconfidence: miscalibration and better-than-average effect. Miscalibration means being ignorant of some of the likely outcomes. Better-than-average effect is when people consider themselves better than average, which cannot be true for everyone. Since people tend to believe that success is attributed to skill and failure is caused by bad luck, small successes in the market may cause investors to become overconfident.
Pride and Regret
People are likely to repeat actions that create pride and avoid those that create regret. Financial economists Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman found that this behavior causes disposition effect, which is when investors sell winners too early and hold onto losers for too long. Whether a trade creates pride or regret depends not only on absolute gains/losses, but also the investor’s reference point. If an investor found out that a stock he had recently sold reached a new high, he would be less likely to consider his trade a success, even if he had made money from it. Furthermore, an investor is less likely to repurchase the same stock after experiencing regret from it, as shown in the study conducted by Odean, Barber and Strahilevitz.
Risk Perceptions
People’s perceptions of risk change after they win or lose money. When they win money, they may experience the house-money effect and be more willing to take risks. When they lose money, they may experience the snakebite effect and become less willing to take a risk, or the trying-to-break-even effect and try to reverse losses. People’s perceptions of risk also change when the asset changes ownership. Endowment effect means that people are less likely to put their inheritance than their year-end bonus into high risk assets, even though they are the same amount of money. The status quo bias means that people may avoid taking action altogether when they feel overwhelmed by investment choices.
It’s not easy to accurately measure an investment’s potential outcomes and probabilities. Unlike a coin toss, the underlying distribution of outcomes of the financial markets is mostly unknown. People are prone to rely on their own limited observation and memory for predicting the future. When people think they know the likely outcomes and probabilities, they expect unusual occurrences to reverse. If not, then they expect unusual occurrences to continue. This is why some investors chase high performances from previous years.
Framing
How a question is framed can directly impact how people answer it. Since people tend to think of an investment as good or bad, they sometimes forget that riskier investments should have higher returns. Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel lecture in Stockholm (for which he received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences) outlined two modes of cognitive reasoning: analytical thinking and intuitive thinking. Intuitive thinking comes so easily and naturally that people are often unaware of it, but it is precisely the type of thinking that investors should avoid.
Mental Accounting
Investors have a tendency to view each investment separately. Doing so risks failing to view an investment portfolio as a whole and missing out on opportunities like the tax swap. A tax swap is when an investor sells a losing stock and purchases a similar one, thereby capturing the capital loss from the losing stock to reduce taxes while staying invested.
Another problem with mental accounting is the lack of diversification. Shefrin and Statman’s Behavioral Portfolio Theory (BPT) suggests that investors use mental accounting to match investment goals to asset allocations. Unlike the Modern Portfolio Theory, a behavioral portfolio resembles a pyramid with distinct layers of well defined investment goals. It ignores correlations between the assets and therefore fails to achieve diversification.
Heuristic Simplification
People use mental shortcuts to quickly organize and process large amounts of information. This process is called heuristic simplification. Two examples are representativeness and familiarity. Representativeness bias causes people to assume good companies are good investments, and believe that past good performances will last into the future. Familiarity bias causes people to stay close to what they are familiar with. They judge familiar stocks with too much optimism and unfamiliar stocks with too much pessimism, leading to lack of diversification and false sense of risk.
Short-term Focus
As long as we have access to a news outlet, whether it’s the newspaper or the internet, we are constantly flooded with financial news. Our investment activities tend to be influenced by the media and other professional investors. The problem is, people sometimes react too quickly and commit mistakes when they lose sight of the long term.
Emotions
Price bubbles are not uncommon. One of the most famous ones was the Tulip Mania, which occurred in the Dutch Golden Age. At its peak in 1637, a single tulip bulb sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. The bubble burst much more quickly than it was formed. When people started to refuse to honor their transactions, the sentiment turned so quickly that the price plummeted to nothing almost overnight.
Although it’s difficult to defy human nature, we can teach ourselves to avoid some of the abovementioned errors by following a systematic approach to investing. Have a look at our previous blogs, such as Building a Financial Model and Developing a Stock Trading Strategy. After finding an investment style that best suits you, it’s important that you follow through. Use risk management and diversification instead of a goal-based approach, and have a quantitative investment criteria instead of relying on emotions. Memory is often unreliable, so remember to keep a precise and accurate record. Perhaps it helps to write down a few rules of thumb where you can see them, such as: avoid trading too frequently, monthly check on stocks, annual review of portfolio and make necessary adjustments based on risk appetite, etc. To remind yourself to think analytically instead of intuitively, one of the best books to read is Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”.
Article by Marcia Zhou, Call Levels Call Levels is a simple, reliable and independent mobile-based market alert tool that lets you track and set alerts for over 10,000 financial assets covering forex, commodities, stocks and indices.
