45. Strategy and bias in stock trading
Still
on the stockmarket and its randomness, I am reminded of a conversation I had no
long ago with a big time market trader who was trying to understand the potential
impacts of coronavirus to finetune his investment strategy. This, of course, is
a pretty hopeless aim, which is brought about by the illusion that previous
investment strategies yielded returns. The chances are that some beat the
market, whilst others underperformed it. The illusion is born from bias,
traders (as well as politicians, business people and the public, to name just a
few) are much happier to take ownership of their successes than of their
failures. Success is put down to strategy, failure to unforeseen circumstance.
This ego building may be necessary to survive in the city, but it is not a good
counsellor to devise future strategy. Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote
extensively about biases, and you could waste your time in much more
unproductive and less entertaining ways than reading some of their work
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