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Stocks 407: Psychology and Investing

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1.
The sunk costs fallacy refers to _______.
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Being unable to ignore the sunk costs of an investment. Being unable to ignore these costs could lead to holding onto the investment well past the time to sell it.
2.
Confirmation bias is the practice of _______.
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Giving preference to information that supports what we already believe. This practice can sometimes limit our success with investing by shutting out other opportunities.
3.
With regard to investing behavior, mental accounting refers to following the crowd.
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False. Mental accounting refers to keeping ones money in different buckets for different purposes.
4.
What does regret often lead to?
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Making a bad sell decision because youve confused a bad outcome with a bad decision. You may feel regret after a bad outcome, such as a stretch of weak performance from a given stock, even if you chose the investment for all the right reasons and the underlying business remains strong. Regret can lead you to make a bad sell decision.
5.
When you judge an investment by objective standards rather than your own personal ones, you are practicing what is called "anchoring."
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False. Anchoring is the other way around, and in some cases it can lead to costly losses.
6.
In the world of investing, what does overconfidence refer to?
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The ability to think that one is smarter than one really is. Overconfidence stretches normal confidence to unhealthy levels.
7.
The practice of herding refers to _______.
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Going along with the crowd. This is the practice of buying and selling based on the fact that it is popular to do so at the time.
8.
What does representativeness lead to?
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Giving too much weight to recent performance. Representativeness is a mental shortcut that causes investors to give too much weight to recent evidence--such as short-term performance numbers--and too little weight to evidence from the more distant past. For instance, a look at a companys profit trends over the past six years is likely to yield more insight than looking at that companys stock performance over the past six months.
9.
What is a good way as an investor to avoid falling prey to the framing effect?
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Consider the total return of your investments. Seeing your choice in terms of the total return can help you avoid framing it in relative terms, which can be costly.
10.
Self-handicapping bias occurs when we try to explain any possible future poor performance with a reason that may or may not be true.
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True. In other words, its like making excuses beforehand.