“You are your own worst enemy” ― Lisa Kleypas, Love in the Afternoon

The human brain is probably the most amazing machine/invention/feat of evolution/gift from god (put whatever superlative you want in there) in the world.  Over millions of years it evolved to allow us to outsmart saber-tooth tigers, control fire, figure out how to grow crops, organize millions of individuals, split the atom, splice genes, and on and on.  I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that the evolution of our brain isn’t the single most important factor which has brought us to where we are as a species today.

Yet, as undeniably amazing as our brain is, the instinctual behaviors that were so important in surviving those early years as a species are terrible when it comes to investing.  Here is my list of the Top 5 ways that your instincts tend to be wrong when it comes to investing.

5. Keeping up with the Joneses: My dad told me some sage wisdom when I was growing up: “There will always be someone richer or smarter or stronger or faster than you. What you need to do is worry about doing the best you can and forget about them.”  That’s pretty great advice in general, but especially in investing.

You’re always going to meet someone who made a killing on Apple or whose portfolio has ballooned to $5 million.  First, maybe they’re full of it; investing is like fishing, where everything is exaggerated because that makes the telling of the story more fun.  Even if they aren’t exaggerating, who cares?

Investing is a “slow and steady wins the race” type of thing.  If you save money and invest it wisely doing all the things we’ve talked about, you’ll almost certainly end up with a nestegg that will meet your retirement needs.  But it’s when people start stretching themselves and try to get big wins that things go to hell.  Using a baseball analogy, in investing you win by hitting a bunch of singles while never going for the homerun.  When you see the Joneses who got lucky when their stock popped, and you get tempted to try to find the next stock that will do that instead of sticking to your index mutual funds, that’s when you get in trouble.

4. Remember the last thing you heard: Psychologically we have something called recency bias, which basically means that we put the most weight on the last thing we heard. This makes sense if you think about it when we were cavemen.  If you hear everything okay and then a few minutes later you hear there’s a fire, it’s probably a good thing to believe something is burning.

The problem with investing is that we live in 24/7 news cycle so places like CNBC have to fill hours of airtime.  One day they have a story that says Tesla is the greatest auto company ever and their stock will go through the roof.  A couple days later they have a story about how sales slowed and the stock is way overvalued.  So which is it?

Probably somewhere in the middle.  Generally, companies don’t change that much from day to day.  If Telsa stock was worth $250 yesterday why would it be worth $220 today?  Sure, sometimes there are major news events that can move the needle that much like a court ruling or a natural disaster or something, but those are much rarer than you would think based on the wild swings in sentiment that come out of the financial media.  As with #5, this is a case where you need to see past the day-to-day comments and just keep that “slow and steady” approach.

3. Sell too soon: You take the leap and buy a stock or mutual fund. And then it goes down.  Holy crap!!!  What just happened?  I screwed up and need to get out of this before I lose any more.  So you sell too soon.  Yet just a little bit ago you thought it was a good investment, so why are you selling now?

In the light of day it’s easy to see this is a mistake and your emotions are taking control from your intellect, yet it happens all the time.  This is especially true in a media environment where we’re constantly bombarded with reasons to buy and sell.  The “slow-and-steady” investor is going to ride out those storms and hold on to the investments that were good ones yesterday, knowing that they’re probably still good ones today.

3a. Hold the stock too long:  The cousin to selling stocks too soon, is holding them for too long.  I am personally guilty with this with commodities.  Over the past couple years they have taken a nosedive, down about 50%.  But I refuse to sell because I am “waiting for them to come around”.

There’s a lot of reason to think that commodities are going to continue to fall—more oil discoveries, the world economy and especially China’s is slowing down.  Of course, who knows what will really happen.  But I think psychologically, I just don’t want to sell because that will be admitting that I made a bad investment choice.  Intellectually I know I should probably move on and sell my commodities, but I just can’t do it.  Pride is something you can choke on.

2. Try to figure it out: Our brains have a pretty good track record of figuring things out—math, physics, weather, biology. Not bad.  So it’s understandable that we have this desire to figure the stock market out, and even more powerful, a belief that we can.

Yet the stock market is a different.  It is people that make the stock market go, with all their irrational behavior (like the things we’ve discussed here).  Because of that, I believe the stock market is totally unpredictable over the short term.  But many people don’t share that opinion, and they spend inordinate amounts of time trying to figure it out.

Some of it can be more simple stuff like “the stock always does better after the earnings report”.  Or it can be hard core like all the technical analysis that uses stock charts, 200-day moving averages, open options, float and volume, and a million other factors to try to tease out what will happen in the future.

I am not a believer is that stuff.  Rather, I accept that in the short term the stock market is going to act erratically but over the long term it will have a steady upward march.  So I invest in index mutual funds with every paycheck and not try to beat the system.

1. Get while the getting is good: Momentum investing is so tempting. If a stock is going up, it’s easy to imagine that it will keep going up.  If everything is going to hell like has been happening the past couple days, it’s easy to imagine things will stay bad.  Similar to the ones above, this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.  As a caveman, if the land was giving really great harvests, it made sense to stay there and enjoy the bounty.  If panthers already ate a couple villagers, maybe it’s time to go somewhere else.  There wasn’t really this idea of riding it out or waiting for things to even out.

However, in investing balancing out the ups and down (it’s called “mean reversion”) is a tried and true concept.  When a stock is going up a lot, we know that it can’t go up forever, and at some point it will probably come down to more rational levels.  Of course we never know when that’s going to be.  In the meantime, it’s easy for our “animal spirits” to take over and want to keep riding the stock up and up.  This situation isn’t helped by the media which understandably reports on the biggest movers, reinforcing the message that “XYZ has been going up and here’s why it’s so great.”

But this is a sucker’s game.  Warren Buffet is famous for saying: “Get scared when everyone is greedy, and get greedy when everyone is scared.”  Again (notice how the same advice keeps you out of all these blunders), you can save yourself from this by just investing in broad mutual funds (instead of trying to pick individual stocks) and investing regularly (like with your 401k contributions) rather than trying to time the market.

So there you have it—my list of blunders that our hypothalamus is constantly trying to steer us towards.  And they’re tempting.  I am certainly guilt with some of these.  Yet if you know these blunders are out there, you can take steps to avoid them.  And avoiding them, even if it leads to just a 1% better return, can make a huge difference.

As cavemen, we were playing a harsh game where the cost of even a small failure was often fatal.  Decisions needed to be quick and they needed to be bold.  And you know what, that worked for us.  Look how far we have come as a species.  But all those things that allowed us to thrive as cavemen poison our investing returns.  In investing, you really need the opposite—slow and steady moves over a long period of time.

What do you think?  Are there any blunders I missed?

You hear all the time that this is a terrible time to be an investor.  Maybe it’s after the fallout of some scandal, Enron and Worldcom from the early 2000s or Bernie Madoff from 2008 come to mind.  Or maybe it’s that the market is evolving and people caught on the wrong side of that start to complain.  Last year Michael Lewis published Flash Boys which looked at high frequency trading.  One of the takeaways was that Wall Street giants were rigging the game to their advantage at the cost of smaller investors.

I’m not an expert on high frequency trading or the million other death knells that people always point to when showing that the market is all screwed up.  The eternal optimist, I actually think this is a great time to be an investor.  Here are my top 5 reasons why we are in the golden age of investing.

5. Decimal stock prices: Today if you look up the price for a stock you get something normal looking like $40.63. However, before 2001, stock prices were quoted in fractions, so that same stock wouldn’t be $40.63, it would be 40⅝.  First off, that was a royal pain the butt.  Quick, which would cost more $20.30 or 20⅜? (20⅜ is more).  We all remember fractions from elementary school, but they aren’t really intuitive in financial applications.

Secondly, it cost you real money.  All stocks have a bid/ask spread which is the difference between what someone will sell something for and what they will buy it for.  That difference is the profit that market makers get.  As an investor you pay that spread, so the larger the spread the worse for you and the better for them.  When stocks were in fractions, just the nature of fractions made the spread fairly large.  So you might have an bid of 20⅜ and an ask of 20½.  That’s a spread of 12.5 cents for every share you trade.  That may not seem like a lot, but over hundreds or thousands of shares that starts to add up.

When stocks became decimalized, that 20⅜ became $20.38 and that 20½ became $20.50.  But then competition among market makers squeezed the spread to something like $20.41 and $20.42.  It’s not uncommon to see spreads of only a penny (see a recent quote I pulled up for Medtronic).  That is real savings that goes into your pocket.  In 2001 the SEC mandated all stocks be quoted in decimals and that was a real win-win: investing became computationally easier and less expensive.

4. Internet trading: You could have a whole post on how the internet has revolutionized personal finance (hmmmm, maybe I’ll do that). But here I’ll focus on internet trading and generally managing your investments online.  When I started investing in the mid-1990s the main way you invested was by calling your broker and having her execute the trades you wanted.

Think about that for a second.  You had to call someone, hope they answered, tell them what you wanted to do, and then have them do it.  That just seems really inefficient.  Later, some mutual fund companies got to the point where you could trade using your touch-tone phone (“press 1 to buy shares, press 2 to sell shares”), but even that was pretty kludgy.

Of course, once the internet came out, investing proved to be one of the ready-made applications for cyberspace.  You could actually see your investments on a screen, in real time, push buttons to do what you wanted.  Even set up things like automatic investments or withdraws.  No question, it’s so much easier now than it was.

3. Low costs: With the internet and the incredible efficiency it brought, the costs of investing plummeted. Brokerage fees on some of my first trades were in the $50-75 range.  That was with a full-service broker.  Also there were ways that they nickel-and-dimed you with things like “odd lot hikeys” which was an extra charge if you bought less than 100 shares.  Such a bunch of crap.

That was about the same time that “discount brokers” were becoming popular and started offering internet trades for $14.95.  Once that genie got out of the bottle, there was no end to how low trades could go, and it made sense.  All the stuff became automated, so the costs dwindled to almost nothing.  Now you can find $4.95 trades and places like Vanguard offer $2 trades if you know where to look.

Think about that for a second.  If you did 10 trades a year, in the old days (dang, that makes me sound old) that would have cost you $1500 per year (remember you get charged for buying and selling).  Over an investing career, that $1500 each year could add up to almost a quarter of a million dollars!!!  Maybe Michael Lewis will complain that investors are getting swindled out of a penny or two a share because of high-frequency traders, but that’s a drop in the bucket to what they’re saving by tiny, tiny trading costs.

2. Computing power: As reader Andrew H said in a comment, technology has advanced so rapidly that your iPhone has much, much more computing power than the Apollo 11 spacecraft. Computing technology has become amazing powerful and amazingly cheap in the past couple decades.  A $300 laptop with Excel can allow you to do amazingly large and complex analyses that would have seemed magical just 30 years ago.

One of the huge applications for this analytic power is personal finance and better understanding the stock market.  Many of my posts on this blog are just that—taking data and using Excel to make sense of stuff.  Are you better of investing a windfall at once or over time?  How often would you have lost money in the stock market historically?  Those are fairly large analyses that would have been a massive undertaking 30 years ago, probably only possible at a major investing house or a university.  Today, they’re done by a nerd with a cheap computer and too much time on his hands.

That computing power has been an amazing equalizer on the financial playing field.  Now individual investors can figure things out for themselves instead of having to listen to brokers like they were priests from some secretive cult.  That’s an enormous improvement.

1. Access to information: This is a biggie. The amount of information available to us now with the internet is mind-boggling.  When I was a kid your source of information on stocks and investing was the evening news (“stocks were up 52 points today”) and the newspaper where you could look up the price of a stock from the previous day.  That was it???  That was it!!!

Today you have real-time price quotes, you have real-time news, you have real-time analysis.  You also have troves of data, and nearly all of it is free.  All the analyses I have done is with free data on historic stock prices and inflation.  That’s nice if you’re a dork like me, but how does this help normal people?

In investing, information is power, and we live in a time where that power is freely given to all.  Let’s say you wanted to invest in Ford in 1990.  How would you go about researching your investment decision?  Maybe call Ford’s investor relations to have them mail you some annual reports, possibly go to the library to find some articles on the company, probably stored on microfiche.  That’s crazy.  Today you can find all that information plus about 1000 times more in less than 5 minutes on your computer.  It truly is a completely different ballgame, and one that is very much to our advantage compared to what it had been.

Bonus reason—financial understanding:  I couldn’t stop at five reasons, so I am including a sixth (the “Top 6” just doesn’t have the same ring).  There has been tremendous research into financial markets and how they behave over the last couple decades.  While markets are still very unpredictable by their nature, we understand them much better.  Ideas like price-to-earnings ratio, index mutual funds, efficient markets, and a thousand others help us better understand how and why the stock market does what it does and that allows us to be better investors.

In a similar vein, the central bankers who guide our economy, and by extension the stock market, have learned a lot too.  One of the theories on why the Great Depression was as bad as it was is because President Hoover and his advisors did all the wrong things.  It’s not that they were vindictive and wanted to drive the country into a calamitous financial train wreck, but they just didn’t know what to do.

I absolutely believe the reason we haven’t had another Great Depression, including the Great Recession where we emerged largely unscathed, is because our central bankers are a lot smarter.  Paul Volker, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Janet Yellen all studied the Great Depression and other financial disasters and learned what those people did wrong and how similar fates can be avoided in the future.  That understanding has saved us a lot of pain.

So there you have it.  Sure, investing isn’t always a smooth path, and as Michael Lewis points out, there are always bad apples that are trying to screw things up.  But with all that, don’t lose sight of the fact that investing today is soooooooo much better than it has ever been before.

What do you think?  Are my glasses too rose-colored?  Are there other awesome developments that deserved a place in the top 5?