Читать книгу Behavioral Portfolio Management - C. Thomas Howard - Страница 6

I present an alternative way of thinking about financial markets and how to go about investing in them. It draws upon the growing behavioral science literature as a challenge to the foundations and predictions of Modern Portfolio Theory. Viewing the world through the lens of investor behavior challenges much conventional wisdom regarding how to make investment decisions.

Throughout this book, I will focus on the interplay between two important groups: Emotional Crowds and Behavioral Data Investors. The story is set in the stock market, but its lessons are applicable to any market where Emotional Crowds play a dominant role. As information and events swirl about the market, Emotional Crowds respond by coalescing around the currently popular fearful or exciting scenarios. Humans are hardwired for myopic loss aversion and to herd, so it is not surprising that Crowds dominate, producing a stock market fraught with excess volatility and pricing distortions. Rather than making things safer, as in our evolutionary past, myopic loss aversion and herding instead destabilize financial markets.

Behavioral Data Investors (BDIs), on the other hand, step away from the Crowd and systematically determine where the market is providing opportunities, building successful portfolios based on their analysis. They release their emotional brakes and uncover the behavioral price distortions (and sometimes information opportunities) provided by Crowds. That is, Crowds and BDIs engage in a complex dance about the market.

Market events may exist for a short time, but the resulting emotions last well past the event that triggered them. Thus the emotional opportunities provided by the Crowd are measurable and persistent. BDIs know this, harnessing the resulting price distortions.