Almost 2 years ago I took the final portion of the CFA Exam. The materials for that section have completely changed the way I look at everything. Level I was focused on market fundamentals, Level II focused more on how to analyze the various asset classes available, while Level
Tag: Behavioral Finance
SEM applies a Behavioral Approach to Investing. Our total portfolio approach is designed to overcome the most common behavioral biases. To understand the importance of this we need to first understand the biases. About two years ago I posted a video clip from one of our client seminars where I
After 20 years with SEM I should not be surprised to see how many people get sucked into the late stages of a bull market. We all have heard the key to investing – “buy low, sell high.” Unfortunately, our brains typically trick us into forgetting this wisdom.
Conservatism Bias: A belief preservation bias in which people maintain their prior views or forecasts by inadequately incorporating new information. Conservatism causes individuals to overweight initial beliefs about probabilities and outcomes and under-react to new-information; they fail to modify their beliefs and actions to the extent rationally justified by the
One of the most common behavioral biases in humans is “representativeness” bias. As Nobel Prize winning economist Dr. Daniel Kahneman described how our brains our programmed to work it is easy to see why this is the case — our brains are generally lazy and want the easiest,