Where Will You Invest Next?

Y-Axis: Life Expectancy in Years
X-Axis: GDP per Capital in USD (PPP, 2009)

Not Making This Up

Quotes via WSJ

Just minutes after I wrote about my owns lessons on irrational decision making, I came across a very recent WSJ article on similar subject.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don't carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on mental short cuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. The short cuts aren't a faster way of doing the math; they're a way of skipping the math altogether.

I couldn't help thinking about my favorite professor Thomas Howard from University of Denver (he has retired to run his own fund, AthenaInvest, which has achieve good return) after reading about the following

Consider the overconfidence bias, which drives many of our mistakes in decision-making. The best demonstration of the bias comes from the world of investing. Although many fund managers charge high fees to oversee stock portfolios, they routinely fail a basic test of skill: persistent achievement. As Mr. Kahneman notes, the year-to-year correlation between the performance of the vast majority of funds is barely above zero, which suggests that most successful managers are banking on luck, not talent.

What my favorite professor reminds me of this article is a topic for another time. But what I was really trying to say is that time and time again the market proves that there is money to be made based on irrationality and human errors. A rational mind could be all one needs to make a comfortable retirement out of the equity market.

Irrationality at Play

I pride myself on some meager sense of logic and rationality. I ruthlessly laugh (secretly) at any signs of irrational thinking displayed by my fellow beings. And yet I made a pompous fool of myself recently simply by doing the kind of irrational things I scorn.

It all started 11 months ago, when I exited an internship with a local mutual fund company and during the same period, graduated from business school with a specialty master's degree. I needed a full-time job at the time. But more urgently, I needed any kind of employment (paid/unpaid) to be able to stay in the US for a while, as any foreign students would need. So I returned to the VC I worked for, without their promise of a full-time position in the following months. The VC was raising its first fund - a on-going process that would last till the end of June. My employment would basically tied to how that process go. Successful fund raising means a bigger budget, which would potentially turn out to be an addition full-time position for an analyst.

It was natural for me to seek a full-time position while working for that VC. But I didn't, some "hunch" told me that I would eventually be hired by the VC and there was no need to take all the pains of networking and online applications. Man I was wrong. When news was revealed to me that there was no chance of employment at the VC in July, I was left with only 5 months, which happened to be 5 months of worsening US economic outlook. Also, I missed the hiring window for investment banking analyst in May and June, during which more senior analysts will take their bonus and leave for other opportunities.

The VC has been extremely clear that there was no guarantee of a full-time position. I largely ignored that unsettling notion. Why? I was emotionally attached to the company. I loved it. Even though I still hold my highest respect for the company, I've learned to at least nip emotional elements from hard facts when it comes to business decision making. Business is business, and so is my job hunting.

Against high frequency trading