Knowing that we make poor investment decisions is not enough to stop us making them. What actually helps is changing the environment, building better processes, and developing frameworks that survive contact with real decisions under pressure. These posts are about the practical tools of good investment thinking — from checklists and probability frameworks to the deeper question of how to structure decisions so they’re less vulnerable to our worst instincts.

 

The Crystal Ball Test
Buffett’s distinction between things that are important and things that are knowable is one of the most useful filters in investing — this post explores what it actually means in practice.

Do Major Projects and Investment Decisions Go Wrong for the Same Reasons?
Flyvbjerg’s research on why large projects consistently overrun applies to investment with uncomfortable precision — the same cognitive traps, the same results.

What Can the CIA Teach Investors?
Richards Heuer’s framework for intelligence analysis — designed for making judgements under profound uncertainty — turns out to be remarkably applicable to investment decisions.

When and How Should Investors Make Forecasts?
Even the biggest sceptic of market prediction is constantly making forecasts — the question is whether to make them explicit, and how to do so in a way that improves rather than undermines decision-making.

How Much Conviction Do You Hold in Your Investment Views?
Most investment views are expressed with more certainty than the evidence warrants — and thinking carefully about calibration changes the quality of decisions.

Avalanche Accidents and Investment Risk
Avalanche risk assessment requires making complex probabilistic judgements under pressure in real time — the parallels with investment decision-making are closer than they first appear.

Why Do We Chase Past Performance And What Can We Do About It?
Performance chasing is one of the most costly and persistent behavioural problems in investing — this post goes beyond the diagnosis to ask what actually helps.

How Probabilities are Expressed Can Impact Our Investment Decision Making
The same probability expressed differently leads to different decisions — a reminder that how we communicate uncertainty matters as much as the uncertainty itself.

A Behavioural Finance Toolkit: Six Steps to Better Investment Decision Making
A practical distillation of what behavioural finance actually prescribes — six concrete steps that move from principle to action.

Investors Should Embrace Probabilities to Improve Decision Making
The investment industry speaks in certainties but operates in probabilities — and the shift from one to the other changes the quality of thinking in fundamental ways.

Five Simple Heuristics to Make Us Smarter Investors
Heuristics get unfairly dismissed as cognitive shortcuts — but well-chosen rules of thumb can outperform elaborate analytical frameworks in uncertain environments.

MIRRORS – Creating a Behavioural Checklist for Investment Decision Making
A structured checklist framework for investment decisions — designed to surface the behavioural questions that get skipped when analysis focuses only on the numbers.

Five Simple Behavioural Tips for Better Long-Term Investment Decision Making
One of the first posts on the blog — an early attempt to translate behavioural insights into practical guidance that investors can actually use.

Why Do Investors Ignore Certain Risks And What Is A Probability Threshold?
We don’t treat all probabilities the same — very small risks get rounded down to zero, very large ones to certainty — with significant consequences for how we build portfolios.

Does Control and Transparency Increase the Behaviour Gap?
The very first post on the blog — asking whether the investor-friendly features of modern investing might paradoxically make our behaviour worse.