PSYCHOLOGICAL “TRAPS” of Investing

MIND TRAPS PHYSICIAN INVESTORS MUST REDUCE AND AVOID AT ALL COSTS

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By Dr. David E. Marcinko MBA MEd CMP®

SPONSOR: http://MarcinkoAssociates.com

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SPONSOR: http://www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.org

As human beings, our brains are booby-trapped with psychological barriers that stand between making smart financial decisions and making dumb ones. The good news is that once you realize your own mental weaknesses, it’s not impossible to overcome them.

CITE: https://www.r2library.com/Resource/Title/0826102549

In fact, Mandi Woodruff, a financial reporter whose work has appeared in Yahoo! Finance, Daily Finance, The Wall Street Journal, The Fiscal Times and the Financial Times among others; related the following mind-traps in a September 2013 essay for the finance vertical Business Insider; as these impediments are now entering the lay-public zeitgeist.

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8 Psychological Traps All Stock Investors Should Avoid - YouTube

 Anchoring happens when we place too much emphasis on the first piece of information we receive regarding a given subject. For instance, when shopping for a wedding ring a salesman might tell us to spend three months’ salary. After hearing this, we may feel like we are doing something wrong if we stray from this advice, even though the guideline provided may cause us to spend more than we can afford.

 Myopia makes it hard for us to imagine what our lives might be like in the future. For example, because we are young, healthy, and in our prime earning years now, it may be hard for us to picture what life will be like when our health depletes and we know longer have the earnings necessary to support our standard of living. This short-sightedness makes it hard to save adequately when we are young, when saving does the most good.

 Gambler’s fallacy occurs when we subconsciously believe we can use past events to predict the future. It is common for the hottest sector during one calendar year to attract the most investors the following year. Of course, just because an investment did well last year doesn’t mean it will continue to do well this year. In fact, it is more likely to lag the market.

 Avoidance is simply procrastination. Even though you may only have the opportunity to adjust your health care plan through your employer once per year, researching alternative health plans is too much work and too boring for us to get around to it. Consequently, we stick with a plan that may not be best for us.

 Loss aversion affected many investors during the stock market crash of 2008. During the crash, many people decided they couldn’t afford to lose more and sold their investments. Of course, this caused the investors to sell at market troughs and miss the quick, dramatic recovery.

 Overconfident investing happens when we believe we can out-smart other investors via market timing or through quick, frequent trading. Data convincingly shows that people who trade most often underperform the market by a significant margin over time.

 Mental accounting takes place when we assign different values to money depending on where we get it from. For instance, even though we may have an aggressive saving goal for the year, it is likely easier for us to save money that we worked for than money that was given to us as a gift.

MORE: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2021/09/04/more-on-money-psychology/

RELATED: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2014/12/15/on-internet-investing-psychology/

 Herd mentality makes it very hard for humans to not take action when everyone around us does. For example, we may hear stories of people making significant profits buying, fixing up, and flipping homes and have the desire to get in on the action, even though we have no experience in real estate.

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“ACTIVE” INVESTMENT STRATEGIES: For Physicians

And … why doctors are different?

By Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP

SPONSOR: http://www.MarcinkoAssociates.com

By Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA CMP

There are two distinct forms of financial analysis investment strategies often used by medical colleague investors who desire to pursue an active investment strategy.

Technical Analysis: Technical analysts, sometimes referred to as chartists, use historical price data and transaction volume data to identify mis-priced securities. A key belief shared by technical analysts is that stock prices follow recurring patterns and that once these historical patterns are identified, they can be used to identify future security prices. The heart of technical analysis is identifying significant shifts in the macro/micro economic supply and demand factors for a particular securities investment.

Skeptics of technical analysis generally subscribe to the notion that the markets efficiently and accurately price securities. In fact, the weak form of the Efficient Market Hypothesis [EMH] is based on the view that investors cannot consistently earn superior returns using historical data and technical analysis alone.

Fundamental Analysis: In contrast to technical analysis – which relies on historical market returns / transactions data – fundamental analysis focuses on the underlying company’s assets, earnings, risks, dividends and intrinsic security factors to identify mis-priced securities.

Furthermore, investors using fundamental analysis can use either a top-down or bottom-up approach:

  • The top-down investor starts with global economics, including both international and national economic indicators. These may include GDP growth rates, inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, productivity and energy prices. They subsequently narrow their search to regional / industry analysis of total sales, price levels, the effects of competing products, foreign competition and entry or exit from the industry. Often they refine their search to the best business in the area being studied.
  • The bottom-up investor starts with specific businesses, regardless of their industry / region, and proceeds in reverse of the top-down approach. Bottom-up investing is an approach that focuses on analyzing individual stocks and de-emphasizes the significance of macroeconomic and market cycles. In other words, bottom-up investing typically involves focusing on a specific company’s fundamentals, such as revenue or earnings, versus the industry or the overall economy. The bottom-up investing approach assumes individual companies can perform well even in an industry that is under performing, at least on a relative basis.

And so, a medical professional utilizing fundamental analysis is attempting to find securities that are trading at market prices below their intrinsic value. Skeptics suggest this is difficult or almost impossible to achieve.

Thus, while technical analysis focuses on market price history, a security’s intrinsic fundamental analysis is determined independent of the security’s market value. Of course, a combination of both fundamental and technical analysis can also be considered.

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DAILY UPDATE: Abbvie, Treasuries, Gold, Copper and the NASDAQ Rally

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The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose as investors wait for word from the FOMC on Wednesday, while oil initially rose on the news of the death of the president of Iran, though it fell back down to end the day lower after succession of the presidency was settled. But investors were clearly still feeling jittery as gold hit new highs on the back of geopolitical concerns. Copper also rose to a new all-time high.

Here’s where the major benchmarks ended:

  • The S&P 500 index gained 4.86 points (0.1%) to 5,308.13; the Dow Jones Industrial Average® ($DJI) lost 196.82 points (0.5%) to 39,806.77; the NASDAQ Composite rallied 108.91 points (0.7%) to 16,794.87.
  • The 10-year Treasury note yield (TNX) increased more than 2 basis points to 4.443%.
  • The CBOE Volatility Index® (VIX) rose 0.15 to 12.14.

Nvidia’s gain helped push the PHLX Semiconductor Index (SOX) more than 2% to a two-and-a-half-month high and just under a record close posted in early March. The small-cap Russell 2000® Index (RUT) added 0.3% and ended slightly below a six-week high posted last Wednesday. 

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JPMorgan shares fell 4.5% as investors realized that they won’t have Jamie Dimon around forever—he told shareholders at a meeting today that his 5-year timetable for leaving the company no longer applies.

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After AbbVie’s Humira, the best-selling drug in the world, lost patent exclusivity in 2023, company executives placed their bets on two other AbbVie drugs, Skyrizi and Rinvoq, to make up for an anticipated steep decline in revenue.

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15 YEAR JOURNEY: From Active to Passive Investing?

By Staff Reporters

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Historical Review

As can now be discerned 15 years later, two trends emerged from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. One was a new type of investment that concentrated capital among a small number of firms. The other was left-wing activism in the style of Occupy Wall Street. Combined, these trends helped empower Wall Street behemoths to push much of the corporate wokeness that is so common today. The financial meltdown precipitated a transition from active to passive investment.

Definitions

Active investment is what one typically thinks of as investing — making risky stock purchases in an attempt to beat the market in the short-term.

More: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2023/03/06/understanding-active-asset-allocation/

Passive investment, on the other hand, requires much less effort. According to Investopedia, it is a long-term strategy where investors try to “replicate market performance by constructing well-diversified portfolios” (e.g. mutual funds) typically based on a “representative benchmark” like the S&P 500 index.  In other words, it bets on the market rather than against it.

More: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2015/03/19/more-on-passive-investing-for-physicians/

Dichotomy

Passive investing took off after the financial crisis when investors realized it wasn’t worth trying to beat the market. Why pay a broker a one to two percent fee every year to actively manage your assets, especially when the downturn revealed they often under-performed the regular market returns? Many opted for passive asset management that cost a fraction of a brokerage fee.

More: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2022/03/09/active-or-passive-investing-pursuits/

Today

In fact, one study found that between 2008 and 2015, active funds lost $800 billion while passive funds gained over $1 trillion in new investment. As of 2019, more money is now invested in passive than in active funds.

Cite: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-politics/article/hidden-power-of-the-big-three-passive-index-funds-reconcentration-of-corporate-ownership-and-new-financial-risk/30AD689509AAD62F5B677E916C28C4B6

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