Understanding 4 Key Financial Psychological Biases

Posted on October 19, 2025 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

By Staff Reporters

SPONSOR: http://www.MarcinkoAssociates.com

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The following are 4 common financial psychological biases.  Some are learned while others are genetically determined (and often socially reinforced).  While this essay focuses on the financial and investing implications of these biases, they are prevalent in most areas in life.

STOCK MARKET: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2024/10/13/stock-market-a-zero-sum-bias/

Loss aversion affected many investors during the stock market crash of 2007-08 or the flash crash of May 6, 2010 also known as the crash of 2:45. 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 under-perform the market by a significant margin over time.

Mental accounting takes place when we assign different values to money depending on where we got it.

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.

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.

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

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PHYSICIAN’S BEWARE: Psychological “INVESTING MIND TRAPS”

Posted on May 23, 2024 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

By Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

SPONSOR: http://www.MarcinkoAssociates.com

As, 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

In fact, psychiatrist and medical colleague Wes Boyd MD PhD MA related the following mind-traps and investing impediments that have yet to be appreciated by the financial planning community writ-large:

  • 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 or less than we can afford. Ditto for buy / sell stock recommendations without our own due diligence.
  • 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 medical practice 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 sighted thinking 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 doctor 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 doctors 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 under-perform 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.
  • 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.

CMP: http://www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.org

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PSYCHOLOGICAL “TRAPS” of Investing

Posted on May 21, 2024 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

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

CMP logo

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.

YOUR COMMENTS ARE APPRECIATED.

Thank You

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RISK MANAGEMENT: https://www.routledge.com/Risk-Management-Liability-Insurance-and-Asset-Protection-Strategies-for/Marcinko-Hetico/p/book/9781498725989

Risk Management, Liability Insurance, and Asset Protection Strategies for Doctors and Advisors : Best Practices from Leading Consultants and Certified Medical Planners™ book cover

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MENTAL ACCOUNTING: What is it?

Posted on May 9, 2024 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

By Dr. David E. Marcinko MBA CMP®

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SPONSOR: http://www.CertifiedMedicalPlanning.org

DEFINITION: Mental accounting attempts to describe the process whereby people code, categorize and evaluate economic outcomes. The concept was first named by Richard Thaler. Mental accounting deals with the budgeting and categorization of expenditures. People budget money into mental accounts for expenses or expense categories

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

Mental Accounting is the act of bucketizing investments and then reviewing the performance of the individual buckets separately (e.g. investing at low savings rate while paying high credit card interest rates).

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Mental Accounting • Money is

Examples of mental accounting are: (1) matching costs to benefits (wanting to pay for vacation before taking it and getting paid for work after it was done, even though from perspective of time value of money the opposite should be preferred0, (2) aversion to debt (don’t like long-term debt for short-term benefit), (3) sunk-cost effect (illogically considering non-recoverable costs when making forward-going decisions).

In investing, treating buckets separately and ignoring interaction (correlations) induces people not to sell losers (even though they get tax benefits), prevent them from investing in the stock market because it is too risky in isolation (however much less so when looked at as part of the complete portfolio including other asset classes and labor income and occupied real estate), thus they “do not maximize the return for a given level of risk taken).

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