The most important things in investing aren’t about markets — they’re about us. These posts explore the psychological forces that drive poor investment decisions: our tendency to see patterns that aren’t there, to feel losses far more acutely than gains, to mistake noise for signal, and to let the story in our heads override the evidence in front of us.

 

One Risk After Another
At any given moment, one risk dominates investors’ attention — even though the rotating cast of concerns tells us more about our psychology than about actual danger.

What We Do When Things Go Up (a lot)
Extreme positive performance is a perfect vehicle for some of our most damaging behaviours — here’s what actually happens when an asset surges.

Killing the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg
The fundamental tension between our desire to save for the future and our craving for short-term comfort — and how the industry makes it worse.

A Decision a Day
Investors face a uniquely difficult decision-making environment — complex, emotional, fast-moving — and we make things worse by treating every day as a reason to act.

More Meetings Means Less Thinking
Meeting culture doesn’t just waste time — it actively changes the way we think, pushing us toward consensus and away from the independent thought that good investing requires.

Language Barriers
Most investment disagreements aren’t really about the evidence — they’re about people with entirely different beliefs and goals talking past each other in different languages.

Bring the Noise
Many investors think they’re making reasoned decisions when they’re actually just responding to a random assortment of stimuli — the definition of being a noise investor.

Being Human Means Being a Bad Investor
The very traits that make us effective humans — our responsiveness, our social awareness, our focus on the present — make us terrible long-term investors.

Why Do Some Assets Become More Attractive As They Become More Expensive?
Asks the uncomfortable question of why investors often behave as if rising valuations are a reason to buy more, rather than less.

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times (to be an Investor)
We have unprecedented access, choice and transparency — and all of it creates more ways to make bad decisions than ever before.

The Noise Factory
Investors are trapped in a system designed to keep them anxious, engaged and reactive — and most of it has nothing to do with their long-term outcomes.

Short-Term Investing is a Long Shot
The odds of successfully navigating short-term market movements are deeply unfavourable — and most investors dramatically underestimate how unfavourable.

Stop Paying Attention
Counterintuitive but well-supported: one of the most effective ways to improve your investment behaviour is simply to look at your portfolio less.

Why Do Investors Play Low Probability Games?
We are inexplicably drawn to activities like market timing and concentrated bets where the odds are stacked against us — and we keep playing anyway.

What Happened in Financial Markets in the Second Quarter of 2019?
You almost certainly have no idea — and that’s exactly the point about how much of the ‘important’ information we obsess over turns out to matter not at all.

The Curse of Short-Termism
Keynes wrote about the problem of short-term thinking in 1936 — and almost nothing has changed, except that the temptations have multiplied.

What Matters?
We spend most of our time on things that feel urgent and almost no time on things that are actually important — and financial markets are expertly designed to exploit that tendency.

Investment Junk Food
Most of the information investors consume is the equivalent of junk food — instantly gratifying, nutritionally worthless, and actively harmful in large doses.

Should Investors Trust Their Gut?
The idea of investment intuition is appealing — but the conditions under which gut instinct is reliable are almost entirely absent in financial markets.

What Can a Book Published in 1912 Teach Us About Investor Psychology?
Selden’s century-old observations about market psychology are depressingly current — proof that we’ve always known what we should do and consistently failed to do it.

Short-Termism is Our Default Setting
The assumption that long-term investors just need to resist short-term temptation misunderstands the problem — short-termism isn’t a deviation, it’s the factory setting.

Why Do We Keep Making the Same Investment Mistakes?
We’ve been making the same errors — chasing performance, abandoning process, buying high and selling low — for decades, and knowing about them hasn’t helped much.

Our Future Decisions Will Be Defined by Our Past Decisions
The path dependency of investment choices means that one bad decision doesn’t just cost money — it shapes the decisions that follow.

Learning to Be a Good Investor is Hard
In most fields, practice and feedback lead to improvement — investing is different in ways that make learning from experience genuinely difficult.

Most of Us Are Secret Momentum Investors
Whatever we say about our philosophy, most investment decisions are quietly driven by price momentum — we just dress it up in more respectable language.

What Do Investors Believe They Can Do But Can’t?
The gap between what we think we’re capable of and what the evidence says we can actually do is the source of most investment mistakes.

Ignoring My Own Behavioural Advice
A candid account of making exactly the kind of emotionally-driven investment decision I spend most of my time warning other people about.

What Can Sherlock Holmes Teach Investors?
Holmes’s method — actively avoiding irrelevant information to keep thinking clear — is a surprisingly useful model for navigating investment noise.

Extremely Bad Decisions
Some investment mistakes aren’t just costly — they’re the result of letting psychological extremes override everything we should know about diversification and process.

10 Lessons Investors Can Learn from Wordle
A wildly successful word game turns out to be a surprisingly rich source of insights about probabilistic thinking, process, and the value of constraints.

There Has Never Been a Better or Worse Time to Be an Investor
Every advantage that modern investors enjoy — choice, transparency, low costs — comes bundled with a behavioural cost that often outweighs the benefit.

Why Do Investors Keep Buying the Most Expensive Assets?
Asks why we so reliably pile into assets after the returns have already been made and valuations have stretched — and what we should do instead.

Mark Twain, Framing and Scarcity
Tom Sawyer’s fence-painting trick illustrates how powerfully the framing of a choice shapes what we want — and how easily that’s exploited in financial markets.

Nobody Really Thinks About Behaviour
Despite the growth of behavioural finance as a field, most investors still treat their psychology as someone else’s problem — and pay the price accordingly.

Vaccines, Emotions and Investment Decisions
The vaccine rollout illustrated a classic behavioural pattern — how the sudden removal of a visible risk triggers emotional market reactions that defy simple logic.

Why is Extrapolation so Dangerous for Investors?
Taking recent trends and extending them into the future is one of the most natural things humans do — and one of the most reliably expensive habits in investing.

Long Toilet Paper / Short Equities — Why We Panic Buy and Sell
The early pandemic provided a vivid real-time demonstration of how fear drives irrational hoarding behaviour in supermarkets and financial markets alike.

Why Are So Many Investment Decisions Based on Biased and Contrived Stories?
Stories are how our brains make sense of the world — which makes them compelling, memorable, and a constant source of investment mistakes.

The Cricket World Cup, Outcome Bias and Outrageous Fortune
England’s extraordinary World Cup win — decided by a freak deflection — is a perfect parable for how luck and outcomes corrupt our judgement of decisions.

The Placebo Effect in Investment
Some investment products make us feel better without actually doing anything useful — and understanding why we value that feeling is more important than it sounds.

Manchester United, Poor Decision Making and the Problem of Small Sample Sizes
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s appointment as permanent manager was a textbook case of drawing confident conclusions from far too little data.

Why Are Stories so Important to Investors?
Narratives are powerful precisely because they bypass our critical faculties — and financial markets produce an endless supply of them.

Is an Obsession with Outcomes the Most Damaging Investor Bias?
Judging decisions by results rather than process is perhaps the single most corrosive habit in investing — and the industry actively encourages it.

Why Do We Make Stupid Investment Decisions?
Stupidity in investing isn’t about low intelligence — it’s about overlooking obviously crucial information when we’re distracted, stressed or overconfident.

Why Are Other Investors So Biased?
Fund managers happily explain that they exploit the biases of other investors — while somehow remaining blind to their own.

Can More Information Lead to Worse Investment Decisions?
More data doesn’t automatically mean better decisions — it often just means more opportunities for confirmation bias and overconfidence.

Twelve Investment Contradictions
A tour through the ways in which our stated beliefs and actual behaviours in investing are in near-constant conflict with each other.

Why Do Investors Focus on the Wrong Things?
Markets are brilliant at making temporary, irrelevant events feel like the most important things in the world — and we are brilliant at falling for it.

Noise Destroys Investment Returns as Much as Any Behavioural Bias
Bias gets all the attention, but random variability in our decision-making is just as destructive — and much harder to spot.

Is Loss Aversion a Myth?
The foundational idea of behavioural economics has faced serious empirical challenges — what does the evidence actually say, and does it change anything?

The Unspoken Behavioural Biases that Influence Professional Fund Investors
Professional investors are vulnerable to a distinct set of biases that rarely get discussed — partly because acknowledging them is professionally awkward.