Observations on
Psychology and the Markets
My family and I are on Spring Break this week in Sicily. We decided to go full immersion and rented a house in a small town outside of Palermo. We travelled via Munich and had a couple days there to explore before heading to Italy. As I had hoped and expected, we're learning so much about new people and places. At the same time, we're learning a great deal about ourselves as well as the universality of the human condition.
I was a guest speaker this week on MarketWatchers LIVE over at StockCharts.com. Tom Bowley and Erin Swenlin do a fantastic job breaking down the markets. Simple charts with powerful messages!
I've spoken often about behavioral biases and how to minimize their impact on your investment decisions. So if I'm so familiar with all of these biases, then I'm able to completely avoid them in my own investing, right? A recent interview with Professor Patricia Devine from the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows why the answer is a big "no."
"Amazon makes no sense," begins a recent article trying to grasp the impact of this one company on so many other companies and industries. As Bloomberg points out, "Executives at the biggest U.S. companies mentioned Amazon thousands of times during investor calls last year, according to transcripts—more than President Trump and almost as often as taxes."
Watching the yield curve steadily flatten over the last couple years, I'm reminded of the classic relationship between the shape of the yield curve and recessionary periods. However, Janet Yellen is here to say those fatal words, "This time is different."
I was not surprised to hear of the coming demise of e-readers. In a time when we're consolidating from needing many devices to needing only a few (I just used my iPhone to mute my Amazon Fire TV), I always felt e-readers were a temporary phenomenon.
I can't stop thinking about this visualization I saw recently showing the population in U.S. states over the last 100 years...
