Working With The Emotional Investor

An invaluable resource for wealth managers advising individuals, couples, and families, this book explains why human emotions drive all investor behavior and makes a powerful case for why advisors need to be aware of such emotions in advising clients—especially in high-stakes situations. Despite the fact that wealth advisors may employ algorithms, fancy financial models, economic theory, and predictive reasoning to forecast future investment returns, according to seasoned wealth management advisor Chris White, people—in other words, clients—basically decide how much risk to take with their money based on emotional factors such as the love they received as children, early life experiences of loss and "imperfect love," psychic wounds, and family traumas. A must-read for anyone in the wealth management profession, including wealth advisors, financial consultants, certified financial analysts, and retirement advisors, this groundbreaking book offers a radically new and well-articulated framework for managing relationships with clients as well as the essential tools to advise, mentor, and guide clients in making financial management decisions. Readers will understand how to recognize the emotional and psychological factors behind investor behavior and apply this insight to be a better wealth advisor. The author explains why early childhood experiences of love, joy, and loss and sometimes very subtle family dynamics play a key role in adult investor behavior; why being sensitive to an individual's unique psychological "systems" is key to being able to accurately assess his or her tolerance and acceptance of risk-taking as part of the wealth management process; what can cause a client's personality to change, especially in high-stress or high-stakes situations; and how to employ sophisticated client relationship management practices such as curiosity, appreciative inquiry, and powerful questioning to understand clients' needs at a deep psychological level.

Do you think you're a rational investor? Most people do. But the truth is that we are all Emotional Investors. Our emotions often cause us to make hasty and unwise decisions that lead to poor performance. In this insightful book, speaker and behavioral economist Jay Mooreland reveals the hidden emotional biases that affect our actions. He explains the oft-neglected role of the emotions in our investing, and blazes the path to a sustainable investment strategy that embraces (instead of ignores) our emotions. If you care about investing wisely and profitably, The Emotional Investor is a must-read.

The investment industry is on the cusp of a major shift, from Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) to Behavioral Finance, with Behavioral Portfolio Management (BMP) the next step in this transition. BPM focuses on how to harness the price distortions that are driven by emotional crowds and use this to create superior portfolios. Once markets and investing are viewed through the lens of behavior, and portfolios are constructed on this basis, investable opportunities become readily apparent. Mastering your emotions is critical to the process and the insights provided by Tom Howard put investors on the path to achieving this. Forty years of Behavioral Science research presents a clear picture of how individuals make decisions; there are few signs of rationality. Indeed, emotional investors sabotage their own efforts in building long-horizon wealth. When this is combined with the misconception that active management is unable to generate superior returns, the typical emotional investor leaves hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on the table during their investment lifetimes. Howard moves on to show how industry practice, with its use of the style grid, standard deviation, correlation, maximum drawdown and the Sharpe ratio, has entrenched emotion within investing. The result is that investors construct underperforming, bubble-wrapped portfolios. So if an investor masters their own emotions, they still must challenge the emotionally-based conventional wisdom pervasive throughout the industry. Tom Howard explains how to do this. Attention is then given to measureable and persistent behavioral factors. These provide investors with a new source of information that has the potential to transform how they think about portfolio management and dramatically improve performance. Behavioral factors can be used to select the best stocks, the best active managers, and the best markets in which to invest. Once the transition to behavioral finance is made, the emotional measures of MPT will quickly be forgotten and replaced with rational concepts that allow investors to successfully build long-horizon wealth. If you take portfolio construction seriously, it is essential that you make the next step forward towards Behavioral Portfolio Management.

The Emotionally Intelligent Investor challenges several long-held assumptions and beliefs, by asserting that a good investment approach starts with introspection. Too many investment gurus tell you to emulate their techniques despite the fact that you may have very different personality traits, motivations and biases. Would Shaquille O'Neal tell a short basketball player to play like him? This book provides a unique template for self-reflection and a framework for developing an investment approach that works best with who you are. Whereas the consensus opinion is that investing success comes from blocking out emotions and making purely rational decisions, the best money managers actually use their feelings. They actively sense what others in the market are thinking, and they employ gut instincts when making decisions. Nevertheless, virtually all investing text books neglect to mention how to best cultivate and utilize empathetic and intuitive realizations. In this book you will learn a process for developing an investing advantage by putting yourself in someone else's shoes. You will also discover how a stock chart is a great tool for understanding what the current holders of a security may be feeling, and you will appreciate why technical analysis works. This book demystifies intuition with respect to investing and provides a method for building and safely harnessing helpful gut instincts. Traditional security analysis is vital, but in this book you will learn why superior returns primarily depend on self-awareness, empathy and intuition. The book is complete with examples and recommendations that illuminate a path towards reaching full investing potential.

The financial markets are a rollercoaster and this book follows the same theme the seduction of money, our ruinous, heady and high stakes pursuit of it, the incredible fortunes and calamitous losses that have been made in its name, the new and significant threat of retail (armchair) investors wanting their piece of the pie, and the perpetual and foolish mismatch that has always existed and will always exist between our evolutionary programming and the design of the financial markets. The dominant theme that runs throughout the book ('Working out Wall Street') is actually a play on words, and relates both to the need to work out why Wall Street traders act so irrationally (e.g. using behavioural finance and evolutionary design to explain herding and panic selling), and the need to use physiological and sport science-related approaches to explain why working out (i.e. adopting exercise and diet-related practices usually applied to athletes) can significantly counter these behaviours. The phrase 'animal spirits' utilised in the concluding chapter title ('Taming Animal Spirits') refers to the seminal work of John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 classic work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and the idea that human emotions-animal spirits- remain a significant driver in (irrational and emotional) investing. The rationale for this book is clear; behavioural finance and neurofinance have opened the floodgates in terms of recognising the role of emotional investing in cyclical boom-and-bust scenarios but what is still missing is an answer to the question So what do we do about it? This book seeks, in as compelling and entertaining a fashion as possible, to provide that answer.

Become a more strategic and successful investor by identifying the biases impacting your decision making. In Behavioral Finance and Your Portfolio, acclaimed investment advisor and author Michael M. Pompian delivers an insightful and thorough guide to countering the negative effect of cognitive and behavioral biases on your financial decisions. You’ll learn about the “Big Five” behavioral biases and how they’re reducing your returns and leading to unwanted and unnecessary costs in your portfolio. Designed for investors who are serious about maximizing their gains, in this book you’ll discover how to: ● Take control of your decision-making—even when challenging markets push greed and fear to intolerable levels ● Reflect on how to make investment decisions using data-backed and substantiated information instead of emotion and bias ● Counter deep-seated biases like loss aversion, hindsight and overconfidence with self-awareness and hard facts ● Identify your personal investment psychology profile, which you can use to inform your future financial decision making Behavioral Finance and Your Portfolio was created for individual investors, but will also earn a place in the libraries of financial advisors, planners and portfolio managers who are determined to counteract the less principled and data-driven aspects of their decision making.

In his debut book on trading psychology, Inside the Investor’s Brain, Rich­ard Peterson demonstrated how managing emotions helps top investors outperform. Now, in Trading on Sentiment, he takes you inside the science of crowd psychol­ogy and demonstrates that not only do price patterns exist, but the most predictable ones are rooted in our shared human nature. Peterson’s team developed text analysis engines to mine data - topics, beliefs, and emotions - from social media. Based on that data, they put together a market-neutral social media-based hedge fund that beat the S&P 500 by more than twenty-four percent—through the 2008 financial crisis. In this groundbreaking guide, he shows you how they did it and why it worked. Applying algorithms to so­cial media data opened up an unprecedented world of insight into the elusive patterns of investor sentiment driving repeating market moves. Inside, you gain a privi­leged look at the media content that moves investors, along with time-tested techniques to make the smart moves—even when it doesn’t feel right. This book digs underneath technicals and fundamentals to explain the primary mover of market prices - the global information flow and how investors react to it. It provides the expert guidance you need to develop a competitive edge, manage risk, and overcome our sometimes-flawed human nature. Learn how traders are using sentiment analysis and statistical tools to extract value from media data in order to: Foresee important price moves using an understanding of how investors process news. Make more profitable investment decisions by identifying when prices are trending, when trends are turning, and when sharp market moves are likely to reverse. Use media sentiment to improve value and momentum investing returns. Avoid the pitfalls of unique price patterns found in commodities, currencies, and during speculative bubbles Trading on Sentiment deepens your understanding of markets and supplies you with the tools and techniques to beat global markets— whether they’re going up, down, or sideways.

Unique insights into how the mind of an investor operates and how developing emotional awareness leads to long-term success Inside the Investor's Brain provides readers with specific techniques for understanding their financial psychology, so that they can improve their own performance and learn how to outsmart other investors. Chapter by chapter, author Richard Peterson addresses various mental traps and how they play a role in investing. Through examples, such as a gambling experiment with playing cards, the author shows readers how being aware of the subconscious can separate the smart investors from the average ones. This book also contains descriptions of the work of neuroscientists, financial practitioners, and psychologists, offering an expert's view into the mind of the market. Innovative and accessible, Inside the Investor's Brain gives investors the tools they need to better understand how emotions and mental biases affect the way they manage money and react to market moves.