Understanding Behavioral BIA$ A Guide to Improving Financial Decision-Making

People can be remarkably irrational in the complex setting of financial markets and this can lead to catastrophic mistakes costing millions of dollars. We tend to take credit for our successes, but disown our failures. We have limited powers of attention that prevent us from noticing critical factors in investment analysis. Our memories can lead us to make faulty assumptions that serve as the foundation for financial decisions. Our emotions often lead us to give inappropriate weight to some factors while neglectfully discounting others that deserve further investigation. Over the past 50 years, researchers have discovered over one-hundred predictable biases that lead people to make consistent errors. In this book, we describe the financial biases most relevant to investing, describe cutting-edge evidence of how they develop, and offer practical strategies that can help investors improve their performance by minimizing the negative influence of bias.