Behavioral Finance

Reality in the financial world of stock markets is that 90 to 95 percent of the people/traders lose money.  Why then do we still have such a large number of people who continue to be in this market either as investors or traders and this number is growing day by day even though they fall into the 90 to 95 percent bracket.

Will Behaviorial Finance help us get out of the 90 to 95 percent bracket....

What Does Behavioral Finance Mean?

A field of finance that proposes psychology-based theories to explain stock market anomalies. Within behavioral finance, it is assumed that the information structure and the characteristics of market participants systematically influence individuals' investment decisions as well as market outcomes.

It's hard not to think of the stock market as a person: it has moods that can turn from irritable to euphoric; it can also react hastily one day and make amends the next. But can psychology really help us understand financial markets? Does it provide us with hands-on stock picking strategies? Behavioral Finance theorists suggest that it can.

Behavioral Finance: Introduction

According to conventional financial theory, the world and its participants are, for the most part, rational "wealth maximizers". However, there are many instances where emotion and psychology influence our decisions, causing us to behave in unpredictable or irrational ways. 

 Behavioral Finance is a relatively new field that seeks to combine behavioral and cognitive psychological theory with conventional economics and finance to provide explanations for why people make irrational financial decisions.

Why is behavioral finance necessary?

When using the labels "conventional" or "modern" to describe finance, we are talking about the type of finance that is based on rational and logical theories. These theories assume that people, for the most part, behave rationally and predictably.

For a while, theoretical and empirical evidence suggested that CAPM (capital assest pricing model), EMH( Efficient Market hypothesis) and other rational financial theories did a respectable job of predicting and explaining certain events. However, as time went on, academics in both finance and economics started to find anomalies and behaviors that couldn't be explained by theories available at the time. While these theories could explain certain "idealized" events, the real world proved to be a very messy place in which market participants often behaved very unpredictably.

One of the most rudimentary assumptions that conventional economics and finance makes is that people are rational "wealth maximizers" who seek to increase their own well-being. According to conventional economics, emotions and other extraneous factors do not influence people when it comes to making economic choices.

In most cases, however, this assumption doesn't reflect how people behave in the real world. The fact is people frequently behave irrationally. Consider how many people purchase lottery tickets in the hope of hitting the big jackpot. From a purely logical standpoint, it does not make sense to buy a lottery ticket when the odds of winning are overwhelming against the ticket holder.

These anomalies prompted academics to look to cognitive psychology to account for the irrational and illogical behaviors that modern finance had failed to explain. Behavioral finance seeks to explain our actions, whereas modern finance seeks to explain the actions of the "economic man" (Homo economicus).

To Be Continued....