This morning I was talking to a coaching client and we jointly realized that to characterize one of the most powerful trading emotions as FOMO actually misses the most important point. FOMO - or fear of missing out - connotates the fear of missing an event which really isn't the…
In the Annual Review of Psychology 2015, Lerner of Harvard points out that from 1970 to 1995 there were virtually NO scientific papers on the subject of emotions and judgment and decision making (JDM). From 1995-2000 there were less than 50 a year and then it began to climb. The…
In technical terms, the researchers call this projected emotion, "anticipatory affect". In simple terms, the results of this meta-analysis of the brain's reaction to probabilities in risk goes like this: 1. A trader or PM takes in information about the expected mean, variance or skewness of a trade. 2. The…
Did you know that no one knows for sure how many "basic" (irreducible) emotions there are? Many scientists have long believed in six, a new study indicates four and a growing body of work by the teams emerging from Lisa Feldman Barrett's labs makes a very credible case for only…
Originally posted on Business Insider, April 17. Conventional wisdom in trading psychology used to depend on two primary tenets – discipline and ‘control your emotions’. But that was before neuroscience started putting traders, poker players and other risk-gamers into brain scanners. Now that we know that all decisions depend on…
Here are some of the things I've been thinking about: The two areas in trading that separate the men from the boys (so to speak) are: 1.) The ability to divide environmental perceptions in half and process them separately. First I ask myself what I am feeling and in doing…
All this suggests that emotions are key information providers when deciding under uncertainty. They make us tuned to our environment. Actually, in some contexts of fast and intuitive decision-making in the face of unstable (high vol) conditions, one expects that the stronger the emotional uncertainty signals of the day-trader, the higher the performance.
... most of which are human. I saw this in the NY Times... and here is says from the WSJ but in any event, the word is out. Math wizzes are human. The human brain does funny things with biases and predispositions that causes it to not see the data…
On The Ubiquitous Missing Information in Markets: What Neuroeconomics Has to Say 'Ambiguity' is the Hallmark of Trading and Investing The situation of taking a position when the odds are uncertain because of missing information is referred to by economists as "ambiguous". F Knight in his book Risk, Uncertainty, and…
The NY Times esteemed Op-ed and they leave out the best part - as mentioned in our earlier post today. It is all fine and well to notice that we behave irrationally, it is all fine and well to say that some things are Black Swans... what it is NOT…
