BEHAVIORAL FINANCE
IN INVESTING

Behavioral finance examines how our biases, emotions, and risk perceptions can affect our investment decisions. By recognizing and overcoming these biases, you can make smarter investments.

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Psychology actually plays a significant role in our investment decisions, from how we interpret risk to the emotions we feel when buying or selling stocks. Understanding the principles of behavioral finance — which examines the psychological aspects of investing — can help you make better decisions and potentially achieve greater investing success.

What is behavioral finance? 

Behavioral finance is a field of study that looks at the psychological and emotional aspects of investing. It examines how investors make decisions, why they make certain choices, and how their emotions can affect the outcome. 

Basically, behavioral finance assumes that humans are not robots — we don’t always make perfectly rational decisions, but are instead swayed by both internal and external influences.

How your emotions impact your investing decisions 

Fear and greed, as well as excitement and other feelings, can color our perception and lead us to make less-than-perfect investing choices. That’s why analyzing the impact of emotions on investing decisions is so important. 

Understanding how our emotions affect our financial decisions allows us to learn to manage them better and make more informed choices.

Smart investors know that emotional intelligence is just as important as financial literacy when it comes to achieving success in the market. 

Behavioral finance & cognitive biases 

One aspect of behavioral finance is identifying cognitive biases, or errors in thinking that can lead to irrational decisions. Common examples of bias in investing include loss aversion, herding, and confirmation bias. 

By understanding these cognitive biases, investors can be better equipped to recognize when they may be making irrational decisions and take steps to avoid them.

Common types of cognitive biases 

Cognitive bias is a form of systematic error in reasoning that can lead to incorrect decisions. These biases are often unconscious, meaning they occur without the investor even realizing it. 

Examples of cognitive biases include:

• Loss aversion: The idea that losses are more emotionally painful than gains are pleasurable — meaning that investors may be hesitant to sell a stock even if it is underperforming. 
• Herding: Following the actions of others without understanding why. Herding often leads to large-scale selloffs or rallies. 
• Overconfidence: An overestimation of one’s ability or knowledge. Investors may overestimate their ability to accurately predict a stock’s future performance, leading them to take on too much risk. 
• Mental accounting: The idea that people divide up their money into different buckets instead of looking holistically. This may lead investors to act counterproductively — for example, putting money into the stock market while carrying a high credit card balance.
• Confirmation bias: Only considering information that supports an existing belief. For example, an investor may seek out positive information about a company to convince themselves to buy a stock. 
• Emotional gaps: Occurs when investors fail to recognize and manage their own emotions, such as fear, greed, and uncertainty. This can lead to irrational decisions — such as buying or selling too soon. 
• Recency bias: The tendency to rely heavily on recent news or events when making an investment decision. For example, an investor might be swayed by the stock market’s recent increase even if old data suggests that there could be a correction in the future.

Recognizing these psychological biases means that investors can become better informed and make more informed decisions.

The efficient market hypothesis

The efficient market hypothesis is the idea that stock markets reflect all available information in the stock prices. This means that it is extremely difficult for investors to outperform the market, as any new information will be quickly priced into stocks. 

Behavioral finance disputes this. It argues that because humans are irrational and the market can be influenced by investors’ behavior and emotions, the stock market is not always efficient. 

This means that even if all available information is reflected in stock prices, irrational decisions made by investors can still affect market prices. 

Irrational investor behavior can create opportunities for superior returns. Behavioral finance can be used to help explain market anomalies like recessions or bubbles.

Investors who understand these behavioral patterns can be better equipped to capitalize on potential mispricings and maximize their portfolios. 

Understanding risk and reward

As humans, we’re programmed to seek rewards and avoid risks. However, this instinct can often lead us astray when it comes to making financial decisions. That’s where behavioral finance comes in. 

By understanding how our emotions and biases impact our investment choices, we can learn to strike a balance between risk and reward that suits our individual goals and circumstances.

One of the key principles of behavioral finance is that high potential returns often come with higher levels of risk, and vice versa. But it’s important to remember that risk and reward aren’t always perfectly correlated — sometimes the greatest rewards come from taking calculated risks, while other times the safest choice might be the most rewarding in the long run. 

Using behavioral finance to your advantage 

Understanding the psychology behind investing can help investors gain an edge in the stock market. By recognizing common biases and irrational behavior, investors can make better decisions and potentially achieve better results.

The first step to making the principles of behavioral finance work for you is to identify some of the cognitive biases you have.

Knowing the barriers that could be holding you back can help you make a game plan to overcome them. For example, if you suffer from confirmation bias, try seeking out opposing viewpoints and challenging your assumptions. 

Final thoughts

Investors who dedicate time to understanding the psychology behind investing and behavioral finance can make more informed decisions. By recognizing common biases, investors may be able to capitalize on opportunities for better returns in the future.

Learn more about factors affecting investments by heading over to the eToro Academy.

Quiz

FAQs

Is there a way to measure the mood of the market?

The CBOE Volatility VIX Index (VIX) measures trading activity in the options market. These instruments are often used to manage risk; the greater the amount traded, the higher the number of investors who believe that the US stock markets could experience a dramatic price move in the near future. Based on data from the Chicago Board Options Exchange, it is used to monitor investor sentiment. Sometimes called “the greed and fear index,” the higher the reading of the VIX, the greater the concern from investors that price volatility will increase in the future.

What techniques can I use to take the emotion out of investing?

The dangers of emotional trading have prompted a range of strategies to be developed to counteract it. Portfolio diversification, which involves buying a variety of assets, can average out returns and reduce the emotional reaction to increased market volatility. It’s also worth considering dollar-cost averaging, in which investors place equal amounts of capital into their investment plan at regular, predetermined levels, thus removing an element of emotion.

How much should I invest to avoid emotional investing?

Traditional investment advice suggests that investors should avoid committing more capital than they can afford to lose completely. For beginner investors, starting off small and gradually building up your portfolio, will help you to acclimatise to the inevitable ups and downs of the market.