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Weekend reading: Big opportunities come around like clockwork

Todays’s blog of the week post comes from Tim of the ever erudite Psy-Fi blog [1].

Guest posting at Simoleon Sense [2], Tim (Richards, as we now discover) gives a whirlwind tour of behavioral investing and inefficient markets.

He points out that contrary to the nomenclature, the buying opportunity of a lifetime [3] is a poorly named cliche – unless investing is to be dominated by ten-year olds.

From the Great Crash to World War 2 to the oil crisis in the 1970s to Black Monday in 1987, massive market dislocations actually seem to come around every ten years.

Of course, as we saw last March, when the market does slump most of the bears who were waiting to buy are too scared to go near shares.

They start believing the bad news stories, instead of trusting the valuation metrics they put forward when they called the market overvalued. They don’t have the mental equipment to trade profitably, which is why investing in a tracker [4] month in, month out, is a better solution for nearly everyone.

Tim admits there’s no easy answers, but therein lies the opportunity:

What psychology tells us is that life and markets are unpredictable – which may be uncomfortable for people who want to see certainty in an equation but is nonetheless a truth that needs to be universally acknowledged.

Still, the securities industry is attempting to co-opt behavioral finance to its own ends. Quantitative models being developed along behavioral lines and work on neuroeconomics is attempting to pull economic behaviour out of our brains. There are even a range of behavioral funds which supposedly use behavioral psychology.

For people willing to take the time and effort to get to grips with behavioral finance in the markets this is terrifically good news because, as it stands, it’s impossible to see how the real lessons of psychology in the markets can ever be mastered in this manner.

So the opportunities generated from time to time by mass market delusions or crazy industry trends won’t go away.

You can read the whole post at Simoleon Sense [2]. (For a reminder of how wrong markets can go, read my post on the myriad strange anomalies [5] we saw back in December 2008. Negative Treasury yields, anyone?)

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