LINKS TO THEMES
- On Behavioral Bias
- On Behavioral Economics
- On Behavioral Investing
- On Commodities, Bonds and Alternative Investments
- On Corporate Irrationality
- On Demographics and Retirement
- On Economics, Statistics and Uncertainty
- On EconoScience
- On Financial Education
- On Financial Morality and Democracy
- On Forecasting and Advisors
- On Funds and Investing
- On Gender and Investing
- On Indexing
- On Investing History
- On Investment Gurus
- On Investing Psychology and Emotion
- On Mathematical Modelling and Risk
- On Macroeconomics
- On Pricing Anomalies
- On Self-Interest, Happiness and Anthropology
- On Technology and the Future
- On Value Investing
ON BEHAVIORAL BIAS
| 100 Ways To Leave Your Lucre | Sutherland's review of 100 types of behavioral bias |
| Anchoring, the Mother of Behavioural Biases | How we unconciously attach ourselves to arbitrary numbers |
| Backfiring Investment Theories | Mere evidence isn't enough to convince a conspiracy theorist |
| Bamboozled by Your Blind Spot Bias | You won't believe you're biased, even if everyone else is |
| Confirmation Bias, the Investor's Curse | Learn to seek disconfirming evidence, however uncomfortable it may be |
| Disposed to Lose Money | The fundamental attribution effect, why celebrity CEO's are dangerous and Stanley Milgram electrocuted his students |
| Facebook Friends Can Make You Poor | Self-enhancing transmission bias and the social intelligence hypothesis |
| Fooled by Fluency | Moses didn't have an ark: Zajonic and the mere exposure effect |
| Herd of Investors | Investors of a feather flock together |
| Hindsight Bias | Everyone thinks they predicted the future in the past, and everyone's wrong |
| How To Be A Bad Manager: The Pygmalion Effect | Underperformance is a self-fulfilling prophesy |
| Investors, You've Been Framed | Lakoff, Goffman and the need for investors to avoid narrow frames |
| Loss Aversion Affects Tiger Woods, Too | Everyone protects gains and chases losses, even golfers |
| Market Confidence, Tricks and Placebos | The Clever Hans Effect; how horse sense fooled scientists and why market confidence is a placebo |
| Mental Accounting, Not All Money is Equal | Richard Thaler, on how fungible money isn't, sometimes, maybe |
| Money Illusion | Focus on what it can buy, not how much you have |
| Moral Hazard, But Thanks For All the Fish | Moral hazard as a behavioral bias, and why Iceland needs to catch a heck of a lot of fish |
| One Long Argument: A Big List of Behavioral Biases | All the biases, all in one place |
| Overconfidence and Over-Optimism | Investors expect to win: at least half are wrong |
| Parsimonious, Big Picture, Behavioral Bias | Neuroscience is beginning to piece together the way our biased brains work |
| Perverse Incentives are Daylight Robbery | Incentives cause behaviour, make sure they're the right kind |
| Recency, Hot Hands and the Gambler's Fallacy | Randomness doesn't exclude consistency; consistency doesn't prove skill |
| Regret | How the Disposition Effect means we hang on to losers and sell winners |
| Risk, Stone Age Economics and the Affect Heuristic | Why stocks with buzz are thought less risky |
| Risky Shifts | Group polarization rules, avoid groups |
| Rock On, January Effect | Calendar effects are real, but aren't understood |
| Seasonally Affective Investing Disorder | Are markets influenced by the changing of the seasons? |
| The Halo Effect: What's in a Company Name? | Changing a company's name can change its stock performance |
| Trading on the Titanic Effect | Technology change can blind pilots and traders to risk |
| Twits, Butter and the Superbowl Effect | Prove anything you want: Leinweiber on death by data mining |
ON BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
| Advertising on the Handicap Principle | George Stigler on price dispersion and Amotz Zahavi on the handicap principle |
| Bayesian Unreason in the Modern World | Are people born Bayesian reasoners? |
| Be a Sceptical Economist | List and Levitt on why it pays to be sceptical about laboratory experiments and the limits of the Hawthorne Effect |
| Behavioral Finance's Smoking Gun | Gerd Gigerenzer and solving the Linda problem by representing probabilities as frequencies and why this means Prospect Theory is wrong |
| Experience, Rare Events and Risky Choice | Prospect theory works - sometimes |
| Have You Been Nudged Today? | How governments are using nudge theories |
| MIA: The Invisible Hand | Keynes on "The End of Laissez Faire"; and why markets need not be Darwinian |
| Predicting Information Markets | Markets may better than politicians at making tough political decisions |
| Satisficing Stockpicking | Herb Simon's satisificing and why overconfidence is a figment of experimental conditions |
| Soros' Economic Reflexivity | Karl Popper, George Soros and why we don't observe markets, we participate in them |
| Studying Economics Makes You Mean | Economists behave as their models predict, no one else does |
| Tâtonnement, Groping for Stock Equilibrium | It seems that the law of supply and demand doesn't apply to stocks |
| The Emergent Rationality of Markets | With a little experience rational market behavior can emerge out of the actions of irrational people |
| Unpredictably Rational | Irrationally defending the assumption of rationality may be economists' way of justifying the status quo |
| Utility, the Deus Ex-Machina of Economics | Daniel Bernoulli, the St. Petersburg Principle and why economists are stuck with utility, which they can't define and don't know how to measure |
ON BEHAVIORAL INVESTING
| Are Traders Dumber Than Drooling Dogs? | Pavlov's reinforcement learning applies to investors: but bad experiences make you better if you stick at it |
| Behavioral Portfolios | Investors divide portfolios between downside protection and upside potential and aren't rational at all |
| Bulletin Boards are Bad for Your Wealth | From group effects to simple envy, ways to make you poor |
| Buy and Hold, the Least Worst Option? | Investors are hopeless at market timing |
| Contrarianism | When the Wisdom of Crowds goes wrong: Asch's conformity experiments |
| Finance: Where the Law of One Price Doesn't Apply | How strategic price complexity makes it difficult to compare financial products |
| Idiot Noise Traders | As predicted, people trade on noise not information, and generate most of it themselves |
| Investing With a Time Machine | Using Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings as a timing mechanism: safe or not? |
| Investor Decisions: Experience is Not Enough | The Allais Paradox and why it may be illusory |
| Investor Decisions: Experience is Still Not Enough (But It Helps A Bit) | Experienced investors trade (a bit) less |
| Irrational Numbers: Price Clustering and Stop Losses | How round numbers change trading patterns and why this means stop losses are dangerous |
| It's How Big, Not How Often, That Counts | Winning big, not often, is the key to investing success |
| It's Not Different This Time | The Lollapalooza Cascade on how banks went bad |
| Jam Today - Tyranny Tomorrow? | Limiting choice reduces procrastination, but at what cost? |
| Limit Orders, on the Crumbling Edge of Behavioral Finance | Limit orders can make investors look irrational, even when they're not |
| Moats, Unbundled | Media companies are in denial |
| Money Matters, Your Opinion Doesn't | Post-modernism, Sokal's Hoax and the Cramer Bounce |
| No Need for a Drawdown Drama | You'll see your portfolio drop 50% at least once in an investing lifetime |
| Noise, Sentiment and StockTwits | StockTwits does predict future sentiment, although it's nothing fundamental |
| O Investor Why Art Thou Rational | Quantitive Behavioural Finance: fundamentalists and chartists in competition |
| On the Invariant Nature of Investor Ineptitude | We never learn |
| Profit from Self-Knowledge | Coleridge is a better investment adviser than Martha Stewart |
| Quality Signalling for Quality Stocks | Adverse selection, moral hazard and when a signal isn't signalling |
| Save Our Short Sellers | Shorters promote efficiency and prevent bubbles forming |
| Seeking Alpha, Finding Omega | Professional investment funds chase returns and fail just like everyone else |
| Self-Organizing The Investment Blogosphere | How to invest in the modern world |
| Technical Analysis on Display | Human visual analysis of trading patterns may tap neural abilities that aren't yet fully understood |
| The 160 Billion Dollar Bezzle | Overtrading costs - lots |
| The Proper Etiquette for Market Panics | Don't eat soup with a fish knife: social proof and market manias |
| Trimmed By The Hedge Funds | Secrecy is critical to hedge funds, but at what cost? |
| Unfriend Those IPOs | Investors love glittery things, like IPOs. Beware |
| Unrealistic Optimism and the Impoverished Investor | Hyperbolic discounting rules, eventually. |
| What's YOUR Competitive Advantage? | Private investors can't beat institutions at their own game, so why do they persist in trying? |
| Why There's Never Been A More Dangerous Time To Invest | Just because it's easy to invest doesn't mean investing is easy |
| Your 6% Self_Inflicted Trading Tax | Most of us start each year 6% down |
ON COMMODITIES, BONDS AND ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS
| A Bias For Real Estate | Mimetics and herding behavior in real-estate investors |
| Caught in a Rat Trap: Jevons' Paradox | Increasing oil prices leads to efficiencies, which leads to more oil use |
| Copper at Morewellham Quay | Growth, decline and the importance of copper |
| Dear Auntie, Why Are My Bonds Bubbling? | Safety doesn't necessarily make for a good investment |
| Economic Value in Aitch-Two-Oh | The economics of water and why not everything can be measured easily by money |
| Gold! | Is gold a proper investment? |
| Hedge Funds Ate My Shorts | How hedge funds became uncool |
| Peak Oil, the Revenge of Planet Earth | The end of oil is in sight, but is anybody ready? |
| Salience is Golden | Gold doesn't always glitter, but we're usually not aware of that |
| Spamonomics | Spammers obey economics as well, and they trap unwary investors all too often |
ON CORPORATE IRRATIONALITY
| Buyback Brouhaha | Companies buy back stock when they shouldn't and don't when they should |
| CEO Pay: Because They're Worth It? | Deference to authority, the Miligram experiment and how aligning executive rewards with stock performance is peverse |
| Euphemisms for Morally Disengaged Managers | Bandura's moral disengagement, deferral to authority and why good behavior comes from the top |
| Greed's Not Good for Shareholders | Short-term profit maximisation is a long-term ticket to failure |
| Inside Trading - the Director's Cut | How insider trading laws make markets even more irrational |
| Mayhem with M and A | Merger success is dependent on the 52-week effect and other behavioural flaws |
| Moral Corporations: An Oxymoron? | Tenbrunsel on self deception and why Friedman's profit maximising corporations end up behaving unethically |
| The Psychology of Dividends | Why Miller-Modigliani was wrong and investor psychology makes corporations pay dividends, whether they should or not |
| When Incentives Go Bad | Incentivizing managers to align them with shareholders is a really bad idea, if you're a shareholder |
ON DEMOGRAPHICS AND RETIREMENT
| A Yen For Yield | Markets will recover: by 2027, in the meantime look for yield |
| A Yen For Yield Redux | The future is uncertainty, so look for surety in stocks |
| Be Kind To An Old Person, Start With Yourself | If we don't connect with our future selves we'll have a miserable old age |
| Looking for a Demographic Dividend | Stockmarket movements appear to be tied to demographics |
| Retirees, Procrastinate at Your Peril | We discount the future in favour of the present, and retirement planning goes out the window |
| Save More ... Tomorrow | Nudge techniques for retirement saving and the consequences for freedom |
| The End of the Age of Retirement | Demographic trends suggest we'll all have to delay retirement |
| The Secret of a Healthy, Wealthy Life | Self-control is the key, and you can tell who has it at 3 years old |
ON ECONOMICS, STATISTICS AND UNCERTAINTY
| Akerloff's Lemons: Risk Asymmetry Dangers for Investors | George Akerlof's Risk Asymmetry; or why not to buy a used car |
| Ambiguity Aversion: Investing Under Conditions of Uncertainty | Frank Knight's Uncertainty and Daniel Ellsberg's Ambiguity Paradox |
| Benford's Law: Are US Stocks and Euro States Fiddling Their Books? | If you want to cook the books don't rely on a human to generate random numbers |
| Cardano's Gambit | Girolama Cardano, medieval mathematican, and the problem of probability representation |
| Complexity in Financial Systems | Markets as complex adaptive systems and the Theory of Rational Ignorance |
| Exit the Walrus, Followed by Equilibrium | Leon Walras and how not to apply science to economics |
| Forensic Finance, Benford's Way | Benford's Law: why numbers starting with 1 are most common in economics and how this helps catch fraudulent corporations |
| Gambling, From Iowa to Soochow | From phantom limbs to the Somatic Marker Hypothesis and The Soochow Gambling Task |
| Games People Play | From Pliny to Nash via Von Neumann |
| Laplace's Hammer: the End of Economics | Simon-Pierre Laplace, observer bias and the failure of economic determinism |
| Mandelbrot's Mad Markets | Benoit Mandelbrot and why Gaussian models of economics are wrong |
| Markowitz's Portfolio Theory and the Efficient Frontier | Harry Markowitz, portfolio design and why risk is not always volatility |
| Monty Hall Economics | Three doors, one decision and why behavior isn't Bayesian |
| The Tragedy of the Financial Commons | Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons writ large with everyone's financial future |
| Time for Shiva and Schumpeter | Why Schumpeter's creative-destructionism could do with an outing |
ON ECONOSCIENCE
| Adam Smith's Monkey Business | From moral sympathy to monkey mirror neurons |
| Altruism: Signalling Corporate Fitness | Kin selection, culture, reciprocation and the Prisoner's Dilemma |
| Are You A Born Investor? | How genes explain the stockmarket participation puzzle |
| Bacteria, Boids and Market Instability | Investors as bacteria and how phase transitions may model market breaks |
| Capitalism Evolving: Be a Cockroach, Not a Dinosaur | The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis and cyclically adjusted PERs |
| Craving a High: Trading on Dopamine | Dopamine can predict your trading style |
| Cyclical Growth, Form and Fibonacci | From Fibonacci to D'Arcy Thompson and the historical nature of spurious stockmarket cycles |
| Darwin's Stockmarkets | Natural selection and contingency at work in stockmarkets |
| Deep Time and the Fallacy of Frequency | Why our lack of self control means we see patterns where there aren't any |
| Econophysics, Conciousness and Cosmic Karma | Physics in economics, from Bachelier to modern econophysics |
| Investing at the Edge of Reality | The double-slit experiment and why we're not designed to invest in conditions of certainty |
| Investing by Jerks | Punctuated equilibrium and mass extinction in markets |
| Maxwell's Demon Investor | Why entropy means markets are unpredictable |
| Memes, Money, Madness | Why Dawkin's memes are good ideas but bad investment tools |
| Newton's Financial Crisis: the Limits of Quantification | From Isaac Newton to the problems with modern quantitative financial models |
| Physics Risk Isn't Market Uncertainty | The uses and limits of financial modelling and why CEO's need maths degrees |
| Perpetual Novelty, Santa Fe Style | When the physicists told the economists to get real |
| Quantum Conciousness is Market Uncertainty | Reality's an illusion, economics doubly so |
| Sexual Trading | Six degrees of separation and how epidemiology helps model contagion in financial markets |
| Science, Stocks and Superstition | Most of us are superstitious and most don't understand science: why should markets ever behave rationally? |
| Stocks Aren't Snakes | How our reptile brains make unnecessary time critical decisions |
| The Neuroeconomics Revolution | How lizards are better investors than humans: probably |
| Trading at the Speed of Light | Special relativity and high-frequency trading |
| Whither Forecasting? The Butterfly Stirs | Chaos Theory and why financial forecasting is a triumph of hope over experience |
ON FINANCIAL EDUCATION
| Financial Education Doesn't Work | Education doesn't seem to improve financial literacy |
| Freedom of Financial Choice is a Myth | Financial Education worsens people's financial decision making |
| The Tyranny of Numeracy | Investing is about more than simple numeracy |
ON FINANCIAL MORALITY AND DEMOCRACY
| A Lollapalooza Effect – Capitalism and The Death of Wang Yue | What the death of a Chinese child can tell us about capitalism and human nature |
| Bad Habits: The Greenspan Put | Markets rule and it's not OK, not OK at all |
| Ending the Divine Right of Bankers | Bankers aren't kings and Thomas Jefferson was right (as usual) |
| Greece, Catharsis and the ECB Moneylenders | The Euro money-go-round is morally and financially bankrupt |
| Foresaken Liberty, A Behavioral Legacy? | Foresaken-Liberty Syndrome - is government use of behavioral techniques infringing personal freedoms? |
| How Sneaky Governments Steal Your Money | Financial repression, twenty-first century style |
| Ideology, Paving the Road to Financial Ruin | How neoliberalism overreached itself |
| Is Your CEO A Psychopath | Psychopathic executives are on rise, no surprise that corporate morality isn't |
| On the Corrosion of Moral Leadership | Most corporate scandals start from the top, even without a smoking gun |
| Manifesto for a Low-Growth World | Growth may not return quickly, so may be happiness is a better choice |
| Screwed: Fictional Profits, False Accounting and Financialization | The accountants shall inherit the Earth. Heaven help us |
| Shareholders Are Revolting | Shareholder democracy is on the march |
| Socialism on Wall Street | Occupy is not UnAmerican, and Marx wasn't a socialist |
| Stuxnetting the Eurozone's Trust | Differing cultural attitudes to corruption and trust are deep-seated and dangerous |
| Tax Notes To An Unborn Grandchild | Intergenerational fairness is not on our agenda |
ON FORECASTING AND ADVISORS
| Clueless: Meet the Overprecise Pundits | We like precision, but too much is bad for us |
| Disclosure Won't Stop a Conflicted Advisor | Disclosure as a perverse incentive |
| Forecasting a Financial Earthquake | We can't predict earthquakes, what chance markets? |
| Investment Analysts, Sunk by Deepwater Horizon | Behavioral analysis showed BP was an accident waiting to happen, and why investment analysts had no idea |
| Investment Forecasts: Known Unknowns | Investing lessons from Socrates, Donald Rumsfeld and Alfred Cowles |
| James Randi and the Seer-Sucker Illusion | Forecasting is about luck, not skill |
| Minding the Chastity Belts: Fiduciary Duties and 900 Pound Lemmings | Don't trust advisors who don't meet fiduciary standards, or who don't believe in psychology |
| Sharpshooting the Investment Gurus | Most gurus and commentators paint targets after they've finished shooting |
| You Can't Trust the Experts with Your Investments | Tetlock on why the experts we should trust are the ones we ignore |
| What's the Shape of Your Recession? | How to choose an investment expert |
| Why Markets Crash | Traders didn't forsee the Wall Street Crash or either World War: history only looks inevitable with hindsight |
ON FUNDS AND INVESTING
| Are IPO's Bitter Lemons? | Explaining the IPO first day pop: the winners curse, or the corruption hypothesis? |
| Arnott: 40 Years of Bonds Beating Equities | The equity-risk premium is much lower than we think |
| Debt Matters | Why large amounts of debt doesn't work for investors or companies |
| Diworsification is Good For You | Why 15 stocks, or 50, isn't enough to diversify away risk |
| Do Behavioural Funds Work? | Funds investing on behavioural principles have a lot to prove |
| Investing in the Rear View Mirror | We can't rely on the past to predict the details of the future |
| It's OK to Lose Money | Anchoring and the problems of DCF analysis |
| Lifestyle: Are You a Stock or a Bond? | How lifestyle funds interact with human capital |
| Momentum Trading Madness | Why momentum can't work as a trading strategy - eventually |
| Real Fortune Telling: Dividend Forecast Indexing | Forecasting using dividends rather than earnings is more accurate where insider trading laws are more stringent |
| Risk := ON | Earnings levels are high: mean reversion awaits |
| Survivorship Bias in Magical Mutual Funds | How mutual fund groups exploit survivorship bias to improve their historical returns |
| Technical Analysis, Killed by Popularity | Why technical analysis shouldn't work, on Heisenberg's Investment Principle |
| The Case Against Re-Emerging Markets | The risks of emerging markets where boom often predicts bust |
| The Case of the Delusional Investor | Sherlock Holmes on investor madness |
| The Lottery of Stockpicking | Why we buy insurance and lottery tickets under the Illusion of Control |
| The Special Theory of Behavioural Finance | Behavioural bias affects markets all the time, but mostly we can't tell |
| The Small Cap Trap | Why regulatory arbitrage makes small cap stocks peculiarly tricky for investors |
ON INVESTMENT GURUS
| A Keynesian Theory of Mind | How a theory of mind is necessary to implement Keynesian beauty contests |
| Invert, Always Invert | Munger's Mantra |
| Investing Like Berkshire Hathaway | The four point investing checklist |
| Jack Bogle and the Bogleheads | Jack Bogle and the arguments for standard market cap weighted index trackers |
| John Kay's Obliquity | How achieving direct goals is often best done by indirect methods |
| Keynesian Investing: Changing Facts, Changing Minds | How Keynes became a successful investor |
| Of Mice and Templeton Moments | How mice show us the way to invest at the Templeton Moment |
| One Price To Rule Them All | Emanuel Derman on market modelling and misbehavior |
| Robert Cialdini and the Weapons of Influence | How we're persuaded to do stuff we don't want to, aided and abetted by our own minds |
| The Anatomy of a Growth Investor | Philip Fisher, scuttlebutt and long-term lessons for investors from the front-line |
| The Buffett Munger Paradox | Marrying Munger's latticework of mental models and Buffett's incredible focus |
| The Unintelligent Investor | Even the greatest investors get caught out sometimes |
| Warren Buffett Bias | How following Warren Buffett's advice is a one way ticket to the poor house |
ON GENDER AND INVESTING
| A Woman's Place is in the Money | Nurture, not nature, explains gender specific risk tolerances |
| Become A Safer Investor - Get married | Unmarried men make worse fund managers |
| Investors Embrace Your Feminine Side | Women take less risks, but this may not be because of gender |
| Sexism and the City | Stereotyping begets sexism but women are less volatile |
ON INDEXING
| Don't Give Index Trackers the Bird | Index trackers may be the least worst option for most investors |
| Exotic ETFs are Toxic ETFs | When anyone can make up indexes to track against the trackers are meaningless |
| Fundamental Indexing Can't Save You From Aliens | Index trackers gravitate to hot stocks, fundamental trackers don't, but bring their own risks |
| Hubble, Bubble,Index Trouble | Market cap index trackers may be a trap for the unwary: i.e. most index tracking investors |
| Index Tracking at the Omega Point | For the long-term investor there's only one point that matters: the time at which we need to start living off our portfolios |
| The Wrong Way To Use An Index Tracker | Timing using index trackers is just as irrational |
ON INVESTING HISTORY
| An Age of Miracles and Wonders | William Bernstein on the Birth of Plenty |
| Behavioral Anti-Trust: Microsoft to Apple | Why most new market entrants fail and why anti-trust law assumes that everyday corporate behavior is impossible |
| Behavioral Law and Disorder | Why judges shouldn't interfere with investing decisions |
| Capitalism Rising, the Lessons of Lepanto | Capitalism is the worst system, apart from all the others |
| Copernicus, Muddling Through | Most advances are incremental, not revolutionary, look for corporations that work on this basis |
| Crash 2012: The Sunspots are Coming | Why economists shouldn't use analogies with physical phenomena |
| Dying to Invest | Learn from the lessons of the past or die wondering |
| Eat Your Stocks | Does food explain behavioral finance? |
| Economics & Psychology: The Divorce | The birth of economics, hedonic utility and why economists don't understand the psychology of snail eating |
| Economics & Psychology: Reconciliation | The madness of utility and why economics got the trembles and had to let psychology back in |
| Frankenstein's Corporations | How the Supreme Court created artificial and immortal life, and why we're all paying for it |
| In the Beginning Were the Accountants | From the birth of zero to creative accounting; how accountants rule the universe |
| From the Railroad to the Internet ... and Back Again | The death of distance, or maybe not |
| Going Dutch, The Benefits of Sound Money | Why always paying your debts drives economic growth |
| History's Financial Shadow | Geography matters for wealth, but history does too |
| Pulling Up the Intellectual Property Ladder | The Tragedy of the Anti-Commons |
| Property Rights and Wrongs | Country wealth depends on respect for property rights, investors take note |
| Revisiting Volker | Changing an inflationary psychology meant changing central bank behavior |
| Sir Hugh Invents the Share and Gets Lost | The origin of the joint stock company and why entrepreneurs often make lousy explorers |
| Stuck in a Weimar World | German psychology is key to understanding the Eurozone crisis |
| The Zeitgeist Investor: Wheels, Arrows and Buggy Whips | If you focus on fundamentals and ignore the bigger picture you'll end up invested in the best buggy whip manufacturer |
| Unit Bias: Cooking, Dieting and Investing | From food to finance, via Darwin and roast hogs |
ON INVESTING PSYCHOLOGY AND EMOTION
| A Tall Tale of Risk Aversion | Tall people are less risk averse: why? |
| Arbitraging Embeddedness | Mark Granovetter and how being embedded in social networks causes the appearance of mass trading insanity |
| Bad Press: The Sad Demise of Financial Journalist | What's wrong with the financial press |
| Born Rich, Born Greedy | Wealth corrupts, but why? |
| B.F. Skinner's Stockmarket Slot Machines | How operant conditioning of investors leads to market breaks |
| Bah Humbug ... The Value of a Child's Gift | It really is the thought that counts |
| Depressed Investors Don't Need Feedback, Everyone Else Does | Rapid feedback makes better investors |
| Dirty Money: There IS Accounting for Taste | Moral Accounting: how we spend it depends on how we earn it |
| Don't Lose Money in the Stupid Corner | The Dunning-Kruger Effect: stupid and don't know it? |
| Dread Risk: Investing Outside the Goldfish Bowl | Slovic on risk perception: dread and uncertainty in markets |
| Fairy Tales for Investors | Why narratives trump numbers, but shouldn't |
| Financial Lessons in Mass Deception | As Paul Ekman shows, we all lie and we can't tell |
| Financial Memory Syndrome | Loftus on fake memories; we can't trust it, especially with our financial futures |
| Gaming the System | Dan Airely on how we all cheat, if we can |
| Get an Emotional Margin of Safety | Antonio Damasio: emotionless people make better investors and poor drivers |
| Get Rich, Flee Temptation | Temptation is endemic; consumers need help with their self-control |
| Happy People Make Terrible Traders | If you're happy you're optimistic, and that's depressing |
| In Markets Bad Stuff Happens - Frequently | Just not frequently enough for people to learn the proper lessons |
| Intelligence Can Seriously Damage Your Wealth | Dumb investors do badly, but better than smart ones |
| Love Your Kids, Not Your Stocks | Love stuck investors lose money, confusing stocks with their kids |
| Mindless With Money | How the Illusion of Control promotes mindless investing |
| Panic! | Kindleberger, the fallacy of composition and the regularity of Minsky Moments |
| Puke: Don't Invest in the Familiar | Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome; or why personal experience is a rubbish investment technique |
| Putting Down the Credit Cards | On anchoring, hyperbolic discounting and a total lack of self control |
| Risk, Reality and Richard Feynman | How risk and reality get separated and what happens when they get back together |
| The Curse of Seven | Information overload: more is not necessarily better |
| The Language of Lucre | Discourse analysis, the familiarity effect and how news makes us trade |
| The Media, Fear and Stockmarket Manias | How the media's attraction to extreme events causes investors to react inappropriately |
| The Psychology of Scams | Some people are natural born victims |
| Triumph of the Pessimists | Being pessimistic about markets is the sensible approach, always |
| Trust is in the Eye of the Beholder | Internet lenders can accurately assess trustworthiness from photos |
| Unemotional Investing is Best | Emotionally braindamaged people make better judgement calls on money |
| What's Your Financial IQ? | Frederick's Cognitive Reflection Test, problems with IQ and an issue for Prospect Theory |
| When a Dollar's Not Just a Dollar | Sod economics, rely on reciprocity |
| Your Financial Horoscope | Cargo cults, supersitition and the Barnum Effect |
| Zombies in the City of London | Pay attention! The Incomplete Revelations Hypothesis |
ON MACROECONOMICS
| Basel, Faulty? | The fire-sale externality and the credit crunch externality and why we need to prevent them |
| Blood on the Street | If something can't go on forever it will stop: the limits of quantitative easing |
| Breaking the Guild of Macroeconomics | Why medieval doctors didn't cure anyone and why bloggers may be the future of macroeconomics |
| Europe, Taxed by Tobin | Tobin Taxes don't curb speculation, they just move it |
| Fear and Loathing in the Eurozone | Fixed or Floating? The biploar Optimal Currency Theory |
| Game On: Basel III | Banks will game Basel III, regulators need to stop them |
| Losing the Lender of Last Resort | It's a capital mistake to assume government bonds are risk free, but that's what many financial models and investors do |
| Regulatory Omniscience is A Fictional Conceit | Regulators are biased, too |
| Religion in EconoLand | The bizarre behavior of the economic priesthood |
| Springing the Liquidity Trap | Liquidity - or the lack of it - is the key to most financial crises |
| The Business of Capital is Bust | Investment banking exports its own instability to the rest of industry, with predictably dire results |
| To Predict the Next Bust Ask An Austrian | Austrian economists predicted the last bust and reckon procyclicality is setting us up for an even bigger one |
| Totally Addicted To Debt | Banks are junkies, they need cold turkey |
| Weightless Economies | Manufacturing isn't necessary for a modern economy but information is power |
ON MATHEMATICAL MODELLING AND RISK
| Alpha and Beta: Beware Gift Bearing Greeks | CAPM, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, and its illogical conclusions |
| Black Swan Down | Montier's White Swans and the Crash of '87 |
| Black Swans, Tsuanmis and Cardiac Arrrests | Taleb, Posner and disaster myopia |
| Correlation is Not Causality (and is often Spurious) | Hidden third variables and the dangers of using historical data to prove anything |
| Holes in Black-Scholes | The dangers of tail-end events for option pricing models and the opposing conclusions of longshot-favorite bias |
| Metaphors of Mind and Money | Why economists model finance on the latest big idea, whatever it is |
| Monte Carlo Simulation or Nuclear Bust | OK for modelling thermonuclear reactions, less safe on stockmarket returns |
| Pacal's Wager - For Richer, For Poorer | Eternal damnation and retirement poverty aren't worth the risk of extreme gambles |
| Quibbles with Quants | Quantitative analysis doesn't handle human irrationality |
| Regression to the Mean: Of Nazis and Investment Analysts | How Francis Galton discovered mean regression, misinterpeted its meaning and bequeathed a legacy for analysts |
| Risky Bankers Need Swiss Cheese Not VaR | How VaR models got gamed and risk management is about looking for risks, not thinking you've conquered them |
| The Death of Homo Economicus | Tversky and Kahnemann's Prospect Theory and how John List's experiments raise doubts about it |
| To Boldly Go: Risk and the Primer Directive | Priming makes investment professionals take more risk |
| When Muddled Modellers Model a Muddle | Derman on Model Risk; more on the perverse nature of badly designed incentives |
ON PRICING ANOMALIES
| Birds, Bees and Decoy Effects | Adding a third, useless, price option causes people to make more expensive choices |
| Death of the Accrual Anomaly | Why accruals aren't cashflow but the investment opportunity's vanished |
| Do Stocks Always Outperform (in the Long Run) | The equity-risk premium: fact or fiction? |
| Exploiting the Anomalies | From data snooping to trouncing the market through anomalies |
| Losing Momentum: Is It Time To Exploit Mean Reversion? | The momentum effect seems to be disappearing |
| Pricing Anomalies: Now You See Me, Now You Don't | The mystery of the disappearing anomalies |
| Volatility, the Last Anomaly | Volatility shouldn't happen, but does rather too much: thirteen times too much |
ON SELF-INTEREST, HAPPINESS AND ANTHROPOLOGY
| de Tocqueville: Trust in Self-Interest | Social capital and why self-interest and trust are implacibly linked |
| Economic Parasites | Poor nations aren't full of stupid people, they're full of parasites |
| Gross National Happiness | The Greater Happiness Principle, revealed preference theory, the Easterlin Paradox and how income differences reduce happiness and cause financial crises |
| Is Self-Interest Self Fulfilling? | Thomas Kuhn and why social science theories may be self fulfilling |
| Money Can't Buy Happiness | People behave better if money isn't an incentive: sometimes |
| On Incentives, Agency and Aqueducts | Agency Theory, self-interest, the perverse reactions of quarterbacks and the hope of social identity |
| Repellent; The Magical Law of Attraction | Barbara Ehrenreich on why positivity is positively negative |
| Weird Markets | Analysing market behavior by studying university students is unrepresentative; and what anthropology can teach economics |
ON TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE
| 3D Printing is not Exogenous | Printing guns: disruptive technology and why you can't exclude it from economic models |
| Book Value | From Sumeria to the Kindle via Wycliffe and Gutenberg: the past and future of the book |
| Can Software Beat Penny-Flippers | Cheap computing will replace investment expertise; but it's a race to the bottom |
| Crowdfunding Heroic Entrepreneurs | Successful crowdfunding depends on entrepreneurial vision: don't hold your breath |
| Dark Pools and Adverse Selection | Trading stocks off-market in dark pools exposes investors to adverse selection through information leakage |
| Disruption By Digital Wallet: The Sailing Ship Effect | Change happens more slowly than you might expect, but mobile money is coming |
| Fall of the Machines | Software is a source of systemic risk for markets, but who cares? |
| Google Charts You Can Trust | Google search throws up investable trends, but it won't last |
| Knight, Knight, Automated Trading Dreams | I told you so. |
| Nowcasting with Google | Using Google to forecast what's happening now |
| Reality 2.0 - Interactive Porn and Crumbling Moats | From ancient music to social networking and the threat to established businesses |
| Rise of the Machines | High frequency trading creates an unlevel playing field, and subverts the purpose of stock ownership |
| Stand and Deliver, Cashtags and Highwaymen | High frequency trading creates an unlevel playing field, and subverts the purpose of stock ownershipInvesting requires structured information, not social network relationships |
| The End of Finance, As We Know It | Automated broking is coming |
| The Malthusian Prophesy | Is Thomas Malthus' prophesy of an end to growth now inevitable? |
| The Wisdom of Internet Crowds | Google search volume can predict corporate earnings |
| Why the Growth of India and China Means Our Kids Should Do Media Studies | The globe is shrinking, but home is safest |
ON VALUE INVESTING
| Angels, Pinheads, Capital Gains and Dividends | From the Middle Ages to today, don't waste time on pointless arguments a |
| Dividends Keep Your Anchored | For fundamental investing there's nothing better than a dividend to keep your valuations straight |
| Don't Overpay for Growth | Clairvoyant value: growth stocks outperform but we habitually pay too much for them |
| In Value, Risk is Not Reward | Volatility isn't risk, value stocks aren't always risky and stock returns aren't normal |
| Is Intrinsic Value Real? | Buffett and Graham style investing requires the ability to identify moated businesses with long-term prospects |
| Value in Mean Reversion | The Thaler-DeBondt Hypothesis: the first shall be last and the last shall be first |