Investment Psychology: How to become a Master of Investment Emotion?

With the ups and downs of the stock market, whether your heart is experiencing the change from great joy to greed, from great sorrow to fear, when to enter the market, whether to wander in the loss of meat to leave? Do you make investment decisions rationally, or do you follow human intuition? Today we are going to discuss the psychology of investing and learn how to manage emotions together. The Tao of Warren Buffett says that of all human behavior, the relationship between people and money is perhaps the most special, especially when it comes to the stock market, which by definition is all traders, collectively, and is literally pushed around by psychological forces. In the modern investment theory, psychology does not have a special important position, the traditional view of investors psychological barriers not investors to make the right decision, according to the effective market theory, when the information is released, a large number of rational investors would immediately respond, make share price immediately adjust accordingly, stock price reaction is rapid, let no one can profit from it. But in recent years there has been evidence that "psychological and emotional factors influence financial decisions". People began to think about finance in terms of behavior, an approach that combined economics and psychology and was called behavioral finance. We understand the psychology of investing by deconstructing the Buffett approach. Widely regarded as the father of financial analysis, Graham explained stock market swings triggered by investor sentiment in two books, "Security Analysis" and "The Intelligent Investor." He argues that investors' worst enemy is not the stock market but themselves. An investor may be good at math, finance, accounting, etc., but if he can't control his emotions, he can't profit from investing. One of the three key tenets of Graham's approach, Buffett said, is to treat the stock market as a true investor. So what are the psychological and emotional factors that influence financial decisions? Let's list them briefly: overconfidence confidence in itself is not a bad thing, but overconfidence is something else. Overconfident investors not only make bad decisions on their own, but in combination have a huge impact on markets. Many investors overestimate their abilities and knowledge, affirm and rely on information they believe to be true and ignore contrary information, or evaluate readily available information rather than seek to understand information they know little about. Many investors and fund managers often have a sense of superiority, believing that they have better sources of information and know things that others don't, so they can beat others. This overconfidence can cause them to underperform. If all players do this, the result is hype. Research by Richard Taylor, one of the leading figures in behavioural finance, shows that people attach too much importance to random events and think they are catching up with new trends, especially when investors tend to look at the latest information and extrapolate from it. Behaviorists believe that people overreact to bad news and slow to react to good news, a phenomenon known as overreaction bias. If short-term reports are bad, for example, people will overreact quickly and without thinking, and share prices will inevitably suffer. Especially today, with the development of communications technology, investors can connect to the stock market 24 hours a day and check stock performance anytime and anywhere. So is it a good thing that investors ignore the whims of share prices? Taylor's take: "Invest in stocks and don't open the envelope." Loss aversion Loss aversion was first described 35 years ago by Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Stanford University psychology professors. Before this, game theory and economic behavior of the author John von neumann and oskar morgenstern, according to "decision-making utility theory" put forward by people think everyone in their own best interests as the foundation, on this basis, choice, decision making, Numbers don't attach importance to the wealth, wealth is the value of incremental part is the profit and loss, they in math shows that for the same amount, People experience losses and gains differently, and losses are two times as painful as gains are two and a half times as pleasant. In a 50-50 game, even if the odds are equal, most people won't take a chance unless the potential gain is twice the potential loss. This is called asymmetric loss aversion, and the idea that falling is stronger than rising is one of the foundations of human psychology. Applied to the stock market, the effect of loss aversion on investors is obvious. We hold on to the wrong stocks for too long, vaguely hoping that one day we can wait for a turnaround and avoid facing our failures by not selling the stocks we are stuck with. But doing so actually creates another potential loss, and by not selling the wrong investment, you forgo another opportunity that could have been rearranged to make a profit. Mental Accounts "Mental Accounts" explores how our views on the future of money change as circumstances change. We tend to keep money in different "accounts" in our minds, and that determines how we view them. Here the author gives a simple example. Imagine that you must pay $20 for a nanny, you thought it was in the wallet, but couldn't find it, after open you took 20 dollars on the ATM to pay a babysitter, and then the next morning, the day before yesterday you suddenly found in his pocket that 20, you will think it's the 20 windfall, even if they come from your bank account, You've worked hard, but now that you have $20 in your hand, you don't feel any pressure to do anything you want. The concept of mental accounts explains why people are reluctant to sell their bad stocks, because in their minds, as long as they don't sell, paper losses are just paper losses, not actual losses, which helps us understand the problems of stocks. Risk tolerance, people are more willing to take risks. Short-sighted loss aversion Warren Buffett once said the best time for the stock market to open is one day of the year. In fact, it has to do with short-sighted loss aversion. When analyzing historical returns, it was found that major long-term gains occurred in only 7% of all months, i.e., in the remaining 93% months, there were no gains at all. In other words, the more times you look at the results, the more losses you see. If you look at the results once a day, you'll see half the losses, but if you look at the results once a month, the losses are much less traumatic. In other words, there are two factors that influence the storm of investor sentiment: loss aversion and valuation frequency. So, how often do you look for the best results? The answer is a year. Only when the observation period was one year did investors' affective utility factor become positive. Loss aversion is human nature and cannot be changed, but you can choose how often to check your net worth, at least in terms of the principles you set. The lemmings paradox is the consistency of investors, whether it makes sense or not. Lemmings are small rodents with high reproductive rates and low mortality rates. Every three or five years, lemmings make unexplained marches in the dark until they reach the sea and swim in the water until they die of exhaustion. Many people behave like lemmings when it comes to investing, including professional managers, who work in a system that evaluates results based on fixed criteria and have little incentive to make stupid, maverick decisions. But if you play by the rules, you'll fail. Going your own way is the only way to succeed. Emotional trap management buffett is the world's greatest investor, it is important to him overcome his myopic loss aversion, related to the structure of the company, Berkshire hathaway is a wholly owned subsidiary, also have some stock investment, so he can be observed that the value of the firm growth and the relationship between the two hold the price of the stock, do not need to watch stock every day, He doesn't need stock prices to justify his investment. Take Coca-Cola, for example. Coke's stock outperformed the broader market in the decade 1989-1998, but on an annual basis only six times in those decades. People who own Coke stock sell it when it underperforms the market, but Buffett first analyzes whether coke's fundamentals are still sound and then holds on. "Most of the time," Graham reminds us, "stock prices are not justified. They go to extremes because of the deep-rooted psychology of speculation or gambling that many people have, such as hope, fear and greed. People have to be prepared, not just intellectually, but psychologically and financially, for the stock market to go up or down." "When people are greedy or fearful, they often buy and sell stocks at stupid prices," Mr. Buffett said. In the short term, sentiment matters more to share prices than company fundamentals. Munger once said that when they graduated from school, they found a lot of irrationality in the real world. With the exception of Buffett and Munger, until recently the mainstream investment community has focused on the interaction between finance and psychology, the essence of investment decisions being human psychological processes.