Emotional Investor

Filed in archive on April 28, 2005

I've added a "Psychology" category because it does enter into the overall money management picture more often than not.

Here's an article arguing that we (Americans) are not model investors. Guess what, you could expand that label globally. The way 99.9% of people are hardwired essentially precludes them from being effective managers of money. It's too long to go into in this post, but suffice to say that most of us are too emotional to function optimally during the wide range of personal and market conditions.

Americans may be dumb about investing. That doesn't mean they are dumb. They've just never worked at it. I'm smart enough to fly a Boeing 747, but I don't know how.

No one would ever put me behind the controls of a jumbo jet, but I can buy a stock as easily as Warren Buffett. Adding danger are the flattering words of brokers and politicians pushing private Social Security accounts. They tell us we have what it takes. History would disagree.