Understanding How Your Emotions Affect Your Investment Performance
Investment is often regarded as a strategic, methodological and entirely rational process. Yet, is this always the case? No. In practice, the simple goal of maximizing gains and minimizing losses is very challenging - and often not very logical - for many investors.
An entire field of study known as behavioural finance is dedicated to studying the emotions behind economic decision-making. Behavioural finance borrows ideas from economics, psychology, game theory and even evolution, to model decisions by individuals. Some of the "irrational" behaviors they observe include: framing, which means the way a decision is presented affects an investor's action, and loss aversion, which means investors strongly prefer to avoid a loss rather than to miss an equivalent gain.
Another area of emotion-laden decision making occurs throughout the boom and bust cycle of stock markets. Here, the interplay between fear and greed is the chief driver. And, unfortunately, these emotions are counter-productive for most investors. In other words, emotions lead to poor investment performance.
Ten years ago, I had the chance to speak to Shane Oliver, the Head of Investment Strategy and Chief Economist at Henderson Global Investors, about how investors were emotionally coping with the economic crisis of 2000. This was in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble crash - when some US$5 trillion in market value was wiped out. Ten years later, as we emerge from one of the worst recessions of our time, one thing is certain: people, and the emotions that guide them, have not changed.
While every investor tries to invest with their head and not their heart, he or she will also recognise that markets themselves are a clear reflection of public opinion - the so-called beauty contest of Keynes. Though markets are highly reactive to investors' emotions, a step back reveals that movements driven by investor sentiment are a lot less unpredictable than one might expect.
As we begin 2010, investors are gradually starting to get over the despondence that plagued market sentiment last year. Thinking back to my chat with Shane, where we traced the downward spiral from the euphoric heights of the dot-com boom, to the absolute despondence during the bust, my view is that the cycle has just about gone full circle.
Indeed, just as markets move in cycles, investor sentiment also follows a cycle that repeats itself every seven years or so. Emotions evolve as we progress along the cycle and correspondingly affect our decisions. Understanding this cycle of emotions is not just instructive - it can help us generate higher returns by investing at times of fear and being less sanguine when confidence is overflowing. Hence the trick is to react in ways that will help us make the most of the ride on this emotional roller coaster.
Much like the boom-slump cycle that is common to all markets, investors' emotions play out with a similar rise to a peak before declining to a trough, followed by a recovery, where they typically go through 14 emotional stages.
