This is a continuation of last week’s subject on my philosophy towards investing. There are billion dollar funds’ and money managers managing 100’s of million dollar funds in equity index futures, FX, commodity futures, equities etc that do not spend 1 nanosecond on fundamental analysis of company information. They purely use mechanical systems based 100% on…

I was recently on the Sky News “Your Money Your Call” TV program with a fellow educator who suggested that investing money into companies that don’t make a financial profit is more akin to gambling than investing and that investors should only invest money into businesses that make a profit. Live on air, I harshly…

It is very often the case that creative decisions and ideas tend to arise when our brains are left alone to quietly digest information by applying subconscious thought to a problem at hand. It is very difficult to think creative thoughts when our brains are being deluged with a never ending stream of data and…

One of the failings of the human brain is its inability to ‘weight’ the information it receives. All the information the brain receives is given the same level of importance and it is only through time and subconscious processing that we are then able to filter the information and provide weight to what is important…

Even if we do manage to make a decision despite being inundated with information research has found that the more information we use to make these decisions the more we then tend to regret the decision we have made, fearing that we may have forgone too many other options! In another study in 2006 Iyengar…

One of the major issues emerging from the never ending flow of information with which we are being constantly bombarded is the complete breakdown in our ability to make decisions and to choose a course of action. Every bit of information we receive presents us with a choice – do we need to pay attention…

In times past, decisions were based, more often than not, on much less information than we now use to arrive at our decisions. This is, of course, due to the huge amount of information that is now available to us electronically via the Internet and other electronic communication media including mobile phones and the various…

As human beings we are often faced with a mind-numbing array of choices when making decisions that can leave us paralysed by the consequences of information overload. This can vary from making decisions about which new car to buy, which personal banking product to use, or which variety of jam to buy from the multitude…

Let’s imagine you have just opened and read an email from the stock picking newsletter you subscribe to and see a buy alert for your “favourite” stock. The company is planning to announce its earnings to the market within the next 10 days, and it now has a ‘buy’ recommendation based on a potential positive…

The last journal post spoke about 2 psychologists, Amos Tversky and Thomas Gilovich who in the 1980’s began sifting through shooting statistics from the Philadelphia 76ers – a US basketball team. The psychologists looked at every single shot taken by every single player, and recorded whether or not that shot had been preceded by a…