Most of what we believe to be true in the markets isn’t true. It takes a long time to accumulate enough observations of an effect that by the time we believe in it; it has often ceased to be true. Most so-called market wisdom is really a collection of statements that are true just often […]

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (The World Cup and Equity Markets)   No-one now really believes humans are rational, either individually or in aggregate. And the entire field of behavioral finance is predicated on this fact. The effects that relate to the market have often been strange. Researchers have linked stock returns to holidays, Netflix, the doomsday clock, cloud […]

Markets are supposed to respond to information. New facts arrive, prices adjust, some bald man on CNBC opines and we all move on. But that tidy story assumes something big: that investors are always paying attention. Anyone who works with other people (or really just lives in the world) knows that in reality, attention is […]

Gold reached an all-time high in January 2026, and everyone has an explanation. Inflation. Deficits. Central banks. Geopolitics. The problem is that they’re all partially right. Gold is weird. It plays many different roles, and depending on which one you focus on, you can convince yourself of almost anything. Gold is: an inflation hedge a […]

The disposition effect is one of the most robust findings in empirical finance. Investors sell winners too quickly and cling to losers for too long (a recent blog discussed how this makes sense in an evolutionary context). But the behavior lines up neatly with the S-shaped value function of prospect theory, so tying the two […]