Stock Market Slot Machine

I strongly recommend an excellent article to you, from the Psy-Fi blog, a regular on my daily reading list. The title of the article is B.F Skinner’s Stockmarket Slot Machines: Win Big, Win Rarely, Win Never. I often refer to B.F Skinner, intermittent variable reinforcement, and how the stock market creates superstitions much like those created in Skinner’s birds. This …

Who Do I Trust?

For well over a decade, my unrelenting focus has been understanding financial risk and developing practical strategies for managing the risk created by job loss, illness or disability, bear markets and funding thirty years of retirement. Since 1997, I have watched the job of managing those risks become increasingly complex. One reason understanding and managing financial risk is more difficult …

On Randomness

One of the most fundamental and most difficult concepts for investors to wrap their brain around is the randomness of markets. This is most likely because, as Terry Burnham ably shows us, in Mean Markets and Lizard Brains, humans are just not wired to deal with probability and randomness. In the investing classic, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Princeton …