Читать книгу Behavioral Portfolio Management - C. Thomas Howard - Страница 10

The material presented in this book is as much a personal journey as it is a professional one. I talk about releasing the emotional brakes that prevent us from building successful portfolios. You can have the best investment strategy, but if your emotional brakes are set, then you will ultimately fail.

My personal journey within – as they say, the scariest journey of them all – began about 25 years ago. During my 20s and 30s I kept saying to myself there were personal issues I needed to think about, but I was too busy with family and career, so put off this effort. But when I reached my 40th birthday I began this journey, the actual trigger for which is lost in the haze of time.

One of the books I read at the time was particularly influential: Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. It turns out that I’ve taken that road less traveled in thinking about investment decisions, as well as a range of other matters. With the help of 20/20 hindsight, I realize that I could not have made the professional journey that produced Behavioral Portfolio Management without also making the personal journey. As a result, I have been able to release many of the emotional brakes that I will discuss in the early part of this book, allowing me to build successful portfolios based on BPM concepts. In its own right, BPM is a road less traveled.

Lest I should be appearing to suggest I have completely mastered my emotions, let me confess to one of my emotional failures. I suffer from acrophobia, an unreasonable fear of heights. Take me up in a tall building and put me in front of a large window and I dissolve into an irrational panic, at times having difficulty even standing.

Twice my wife and I have gone up the Eiffel Tower. We took the elevator to the second level and she continued to the third level alone, leaving me trembling on the second level, unable to bring myself to take what I was convinced was the perilous journey to the third level. Twice she wrote our names on the wall on the third level without me, which took a little romance out of the Parisian experience. My acrophobia is a constant reminder of the challenge one faces when trying to master emotions; don’t expect it to be easy.