How to avoid a common investment mistake

  • 📰 TheEconomist
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 57 sec. here
  • 2 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 26%
  • Publisher: 92%

Business News News

Business Business Latest News,Business Business Headlines

Think less about what to buy, and more about how much

hear a professional investor talk about a trade that taught them a lot, prick up your ears. Usually, this is code for “a time I lost an absolutely colossal amount of money”, and you are in for one of the better stories about how finance works at the coalface.

Now, along with his present-day colleague James White, he has written a book that aims to spare other investors his mistakes. Fortunately, “The Missing Billionaires” is not a discussion of the minutiae of’s bond-arbitrage trades. Instead, it examines what its authors argue is a much more important—and neglected—question than picking the right investments to buy or sell: not “what” but “how much”.

A list of the coin-flippers’ mistakes reads like a parable of how not to invest in the stockmarket. Rather than picking a strategy and sticking to it, subjects bet erratically. Nearly a third wagered their entire pot on a single flip and, amazingly, some did so on the 40% chance of getting tails. Many doubled down on losses, even though doing so is a reliable way of making mild ones catastrophic.

The authors’ great success is in offering a consistent and explicit framework within which to do all this. At its core is the concept of “expected utility”, or the pleasure derived from a given level of wealth. This accounts for the fact that most people are averse to risking large chunks of their capital.

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.
We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 6. in BUSİNESS

Business Business Latest News, Business Business Headlines