Dive into the archives.
- The Markets’ Increasing Dread
It has been a few weeks since the “resolution” of the US debt crisis. And there has been a cascading erosion of public confidence as unemployment, diminished growth and “Japanization” in Europe and the US, increasing dangers of Eurodebt sans Eurobonds have correlated with a 16% drop in the S&P ( a measure of convenience). [...]
- Waiting on Investments
Retail investment requires two kinds of trust: one monetary and the other, a trust in expectations. Together, their demand for fulfillment is that the investor must wait. Necessarily, the investor spends a lot of time waiting: waiting for a good market entry point; waiting for a target exit point; waiting for market trends to turn; [...]
- Waiting for Salvation or Damnation in a Stock Downturn
Remember the sound of a falling tree in an un-peopled forest? Watching its price as a stock plummets in the absence of corporate explanation might echo the same sound: if the clamor from retail investors were not so loud! Recently, I’ve been studying equity message-boards in relation to investors’ management of anxiety as stocks descend [...]
- Online Equity Message-Boards as Virtual Workteams
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all buoyant stocks are the same; while the issues sinking fast are all different. Two types of decline are notable: the first is cacophonous— in which too much information and noise are continuous, as with BP stock during the 2010 Gulf oil spill. The other is silent: with the stock’s initial drop [...]
- Emotions, Expectations, and Equity Message Boards
Given that the annual trajectory of individual equities describes a bell-shaped price-curve reflective of aggregated emotions and expectations, there is a fascinating local development as passions and prices approach the tantalizingly underpriced (or overpriced) tails: the online message boards dedicated to individual stocks become the setting of passionate argument and diatribe reflecting the blood-sport of [...]
- Equities and the Time Value of Emotion
A commonplace in Finance I is the “time value of money”- the idea that future worth may be discounted to the present moment. But looking at the oscillation of stocks over a given time-period, spanning a universe of daily volatility unknowable in any discrete “present”, it makes you wonder about an equity’s present “value”. What [...]
- The Psychology of Investment “Value”
Warren Buffett has famously said about equities that “price is what you pay, value is what you get”. Hearing this, the investor nods: yes, it sounds correct— buy cheap, sell dear. But buy cheap, sell dear isn’t so easy. Something must transpire in order for this to happen. That something is the market’s attention and [...]
- The Essential Psychology Within Financial Investment
We know corporations are legally bound to maximize self-interest. What about investors? The act of investment is in “laying out money or capital in an enterprise with the expectation of profit” ( wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn). Investment in financial markets occurs through the purchase of financial instruments. Profit is expected is through some combination of interest, income, and [...]
- The Electronic Herd and the Market as Open System
The current sway, within market systems, of what journalist Thomas Friedman called “the electronic herd” has revolutionized the way in which retail investors must approach the market. No longer are the benchmarks of financial statement analysis and technical analysis sufficient to judge the attractiveness of equity offerings. Rather, because of sudden and turbulent shifts of [...]
