What is a Cognitive Bias?
A Cognitive Bias is an element in our psychology which makes decisions for us. In fact, given there are so many of them, you might even say that our psychology is just Cognitive Biases. I discuss about 20 of them and give market context in my new book:
One example which I discussed in a previous post is Hindsight Bias. This makes us think that everything which has happened was inevitable. This in turn makes us very bad at knowing what level of probability we assigned to past events. We seem to remember that we said that a prior event was going to occur with 90% probability when in fact, we gave it a probability of 30% before that event occurred. This will obviously have unhelpful effects in the context of markets. It will make us greatly overestimate our chances of knowing what is going to happen next, which may make us trade with over-confidence. There is nothing quite like over-confidence to kill market performance.
Learn More About Cognitive Biases
As I said, the book covers around 20 biases and their effects in markets in much more detail than I can give above. The thing is though, that there are way more biases than that. In fact, in the chart below, you can see just how many there are.
Every one of these biases will affect your market thinking and that of everyone else involved. So it looks like we all have some work to do!
In the links below I give you more information about a wide set of cognitive biases. These are all in addition to the ones I cover in the book. Many of them are very surprising.
See Also:
#Narcissism and #Unexpected Behaviour
The Illusory Truth Effect And Financial Markets
If You Like Gin And Marmite, You Are Probably A Better Trader
The Late Evaluation Effect And Financial Markets
The #Bitcoin Bubble Is Caused By The Halo Effect
The #Anecdotal Fallacy And The #Bitcoin Bubble
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