Basics Beginner: Psychology and Investing

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1.
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.
2.
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.
3.
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.
4.
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.
5.
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.
6.
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.
7.
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.
8.
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.
9.
Investors who exhibit "herding" behavior tend to think that other investors have more information than they do.
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True. Herding refers to investing along with the crowd. This usually entails believing that others have information that you dont.
10.
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.