German, Brazilian, English, Argentine, and Spanish football fans, take heart. Football (or in American vernacular - soccer) is quantifiably the least predictable major sport. In no other sport is luck such a critical determinant of the outcome. So you have that going for you the next time you sit down with a Frenchman to discuss [...]
1) Turn off the financial noise machine. Information overload is the norm in today’s world. We demand it. We expect it. Your mind, my mind, and all of our minds are wired to digest information, emotionally respond to the information, and then to do something as a result. This is why and how advertising works. [...]
"It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.” — Thucydides Immediately following the British vote to exit from the European Union (“Brexit”), we sent an email to you and other clients explaining the implications. A [...]
The most interesting research project I worked on in graduate school was a study of statistical inefficiencies in sports gambling markets. My small team of fellow classmates hypothesized on all kinds of possible anomalies in sports. Was the over/under line inefficient when high scoring NBA or NFL teams were competing? Were teams coming off a [...]
The following is an excerpt from the quarterly letter we recently sent to clients on the lure of investment prediction. Rock-paper-scissors ranks somewhere near the top of a list of universally known childhood games. The game separates itself from games of pure chance like coin flipping or the card game war in that participants can gain an [...]
Anyone who attended summer camp as a kid likely equates marshmallows with two things – a fundamental ingredient in making s’mores and the only ingredient needed for a game of chubby bunny. When a psychologist hears the word marshmallow, however, the first thought may not be of s’mores or chubby bunny. Instead, a psychologist likely [...]
The following is an excerpt from the letter we wrote to clients this month. It offers a useful lesson in the behavioral tendencies of humans. Many Americans tuned in to watch the World Cup during the past month. Some even learned player names and now better understand the game’s subtleties. From this experience, it likely became [...]
We recently sent our quarterly letter to clients and the following is an excerpt that offers our thoughts on the merits of making an investment forecast for 2014, or any year, for that matter. The fact that both the economies and the stock markets of the developed nations performed so well last year might lead [...]
The following is an excerpt from the letter we wrote to clients in July 2013 and provides a worthy lesson in behavioral investment. Peter Bernstein in Against the Gods states that the evidence of investor behavior “reveals repeated patterns of irrationality, inconsistency, and incompetence in the ways [they] arrive at decisions and choices when faced with uncertainty.” [...]
