December 2016 - Page 2 of 2

Note to Readers: In Stream, we suggest worthwhile reading material on a variety of topics, not all of which are directly related to investing. Some of the articles require you to be paid subscriber of those sites. However, it is often possible to read such articles by going to Google News and searching for the article’s title.

Some nice stuff we are reading, watching, and observing at the start of this weekend…

Investing/Stock Market

(850 words / 3 minutes read) We are fortunate to be living in an era where we have all the teachings of wise investors available to us. As compared to 19th century, it has become much easier and cheaper for small investors to participate in the growth of businesses through stock market. Jason Zweig, in his recent article, reminds us some of the greatest words of investing wisdom that have been spoken in the past century. Zweig writes –

You don’t need to have known these people to be grateful for their wisdom. As the biologist Richard Dawkins pointed out in a lecture in 1996, many of us today know more about the world around us than Aristotle, the greatest mind of his age, did more than 2,300 years ago: “Science is cumulative, and we live later.

[Read more…] about Safal Niveshak Stream – December 3, 2016

Every day, shortly before nine o’clock in the morning, a man with a red hat stands at a busy traffic light and begins to wave his cap frantically. After five minutes he disappears.

One day, a policeman comes up to him and asks: “Sir! May I ask what you are doing?”

“I’m keeping the giraffes away,” replies the man.

The puzzled policeman looks around and tells him, “But there aren’t any giraffes here.”

“Well, I must be doing a good job, then.” says the man proudly.

You would conclude that the man with the red hat wasn’t in the pink of his mental health. However, is it just a case of misplaced understanding of causation vs correlation? Actually, there is more to it.

The man’s belief, that absence of evidence (giraffes) is a proof of his prowess in controlling giraffe traffic, is the result of a behavioural bias called Illusion of Control. It’s the tendency to believe that we can influence something over which we have absolutely no sway.

So where does this behavioural quirk come from? In millions of years of evolution, Mother Nature has hard-wired this cognitive bias in the human brain to increase the chances of survival in a hunter-gatherer environment. It’s nature’s way to deal with uncertainty.

Archives for December 2016