Bring on the blindfolded monkeys. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning Princeton University psychologist who is widely credited with creating the field of behavioral economics, has some advice for stockpickers: It’s all luck. What? That’s blasphemy to investment professionals who turn to all sorts of tricks and scientific methods to make decisions affecting millions, if not […]

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Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part Perspectives series on the principles of “mindful” trading. Read the first. Professional athletes often expound during post-game media sessions about being “in the zone.” It’s a parallel universe where all goes quiet, time seems to stand still, and their ultimate triumphs are almost effortless. A similar […]

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In a recent study, Harvard University researchers determined that some 47% of people performing any given task found their minds drifting to other subjects. There’s a lesson here for traders. Specifically, the importance of maintaining laser-focused attention on the here and now. Given everything competing for our attention these days, that’s easier said than done. […]

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Grab a cup of coffee, find a comfortable chair, and settle in with some of the all-time trading greats courtesy of Jack Schwager, whose recently published The Little Book of Market Wizards: Lessons from the Greatest Traders offers a glimpse inside the minds of Warren Buffett, Paul Tudor Jones, and other noteworthies. Through some five […]

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Everyone makes mistakes. But there are two types of people: those who learn from their mistakes and those who don’t. The “value of mistakes” is the title of one chapter in Jack Schwager’s latest book The Little Book of Market Wizards: Lessons from the Greatest Traders. We spoke with him to dig a little deeper. […]

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In the final moments of the iconic movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko confronts his former protégé Bud Fox after discovering the wannabe set him up to lose millions to a hedge fund rival in a corporate buyout. Against the backdrop of New York’s Central Park, Gekko verbally and physically abuses Fox, but ultimately just asks, […]

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Many things attract investors to the stock market, but perhaps the most compelling is the idea of being able to trade for a living. I know that’s what was on my mind when I bought my first stock back in 1985—being my own boss, setting my own hours, and relying on my own wits to […]

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Trading is a learned behavior that takes smarts, discipline, and a whole lot of patience. But novice traders often jump in unprepared and without an action plan. They can quickly find themselves in the “overtrading” abyss—a place they could have avoided by taking the time to learn about markets and experimenting to find the strategies […]

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Are you looking for love in all the wrong places? If you think you’re going to find it the stock market every day, all the time, give up that notion now. Falling in love with a stock position might be a mental investing trap that shreds your profit-and-loss statement. It’s called the “endowment effect,” and […]

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I’m not a fan of the ’80s rock group Loverboy, but I do have to agree with the premise espoused in their hit single “Working for the Weekend”—that everyone is, in fact, working for the weekend. The weekend is a time to catch our breath and dive into projects we’ve been putting off. And if […]

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