The Behavioral Investor

The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) found that 60% of those surveyed felt they’d be able to save enough for a comfortable retirement but that only 41% of those surveyed had ever tried to calculate how much money they’d actually need for a comfortable retirement.

As news outlets become more and more partisan and specialized, the value of information can become so diminished that it can actually become harmful. Those who ought to be selling signal have by and large become purveyors of noise. What’s more, the coming glut of information means that we will be compelled to rely more and more heavily on heuristic

Making money feels good, all right; it just doesn’t feel as good as expecting to make money.”

Of the 15,000 studies taken into consideration, a paltry .013% of them (that is, 200) met the rigorous standards for inclusion in the meta-analysis.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes to his protégé: “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you b

“We create our fate every day… most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.” — Henry Miller

“If you don’t know who you are, Wall Street is an expensive place to find out.” — Adam Smith, The Money Game

Capital markets, driven by the same human actors that arbitrarily dehumanize their peers, are nothing more than a series of positive and negative feedback loops careening toward and away from the mythical notion of fair value. This circular relationship between cause and effect is known as reflexivity.

As Fischer Black notes, “Noise makes financial markets possible, but it also makes them imperfect.” No noise, no action.