Basics Beginner: Psychology and Investing

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1.
What does anchoring often lead to?
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An unwillingness to part with laggard investments. Investors often cling to investments in order to wait for a point at which they will break even, even if the underlying business has fundamentally changed for the worse.
2.
Confirmation bias is a good investing practice to follow because it usually leads to good decisions.
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False. While it sometimes does, it can also deprive us of choosing other, potentially good opportunities.
3.
In investing, overconfidence means thinking that we are more capable than we really are.
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True. Overconfidence is an unhealthy extension of confidence.
4.
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.
5.
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.
6.
Mental accounting refers to _______.
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Keeping our money in different buckets for different purposes. While this practice is often beneficial, it can sometimes lead to wasteful spending depending on how we view those buckets.
7.
In investing, self-handicapping might be considered the opposite of _______.
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Overconfidence. Self-handicapping involves looking for excuses beforehand to explain why something might not work. If it indeed does not work, we have handicapped ourselves.
8.
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.
9.
Which of the following examples illustrates selective memory?
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Remembering only the successes. Selective memory, as a rule, selects those memories that we want to preserve.
10.
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.