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Stocks 407: Psychology and Investing

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1.
A way to describe the psychological concept of loss aversion is this: strongly preferring to avoid losses over acquiring gains.
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True. This behavior can in some cases cause you to lose money.
2.
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.
3.
The framing effect can lead you to treat buying decisions in relative terms.
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True. This effect can affect the choices you make when you buy investments.
4.
What does investing with the crowd often lead to?
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Choosing investments that are inappropriate for your goals. Following investment fashion can lead to fading performance or inappropriate investments for your particular goals.
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.
If you find yourself habitually buying shares of a company that has treated you well in the past, even when the data suggest it would be unwise, you could be operating under confirmation bias.
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True. Though its not always a bad thing, investing against the reality of the company can sometimes be detrimental.
7.
Self-handicapping bias occurs when we _______.
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Think of excuses before we do something to justify failure just in case it happens. These excuses can sabotage our performance.
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 does overconfidence in investing often lead to?
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Rapid trading. Overconfident investors trade more rapidly because they think they know more than those on the opposite end of the trade.
10.
An example of sunk costs is _______.
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Holding on to a stock for too long because you have put a lot of money into it. When we have "sunk" money into something, we may be reluctant to let go of it when it turns into a loser.