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MRI’s of Succesful Traders

I’ve seen this study making the rounds on several websites now as a type of neuroeconomic confirmation of Buffetological principles…

Perhaps procedure might be slightly useful as a means of seeing physical brain improvement by training– such as that found through meditative practices.

“Traders who buy more aggressively based on NAcc signals earn less. High-earning traders have early warning signals in the anterior insular cortex before prices reach a peak, and sell coincidently with that signal, precipitating the crash. These experiments could help understand other cases in which human groups badly miscompute the value of actions or events.”

“Neuroeconomists Confirm Warren Buffet’s Wisdom”: (more…)

MRI’s of Succesful Traders

I’ve seen this study making the rounds on several websites now as a type of neuroeconomic confirmation of Buffetological principles…

Perhaps procedure might be slightly useful as a means of seeing physical brain improvement by training– such as that found through meditative practices.

“Traders who buy more aggressively based on NAcc signals earn less. High-earning traders have early warning signals in the anterior insular cortex before prices reach a peak, and sell coincidently with that signal, precipitating the crash. These experiments could help understand other cases in which human groups badly miscompute the value of actions or events.”

“Neuroeconomists Confirm Warren Buffet’s Wisdom”:

“Seeing what’s going on in people’s brains when they are trading suggests that Buffett was right on target,” says Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech.

That is because in their experimental markets, Camerer and his colleagues found two distinct types of activity in the brains of participants—one that made a small fraction of participants nervous and prompted them to sell their experimental shares even as prices were on the rise, and another that was much more common and made traders behave in a greedy way, buying aggressively during the bubble and even after the peak. The lucky few who received the early warning signal got out of the market early, ultimately causing the bubble to burst, and earned the most money. The others displayed what former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance” and lost their proverbial shirts.

Classic Wall Street Quotations

Soros, Buffett, Templeton, Livermore, Rothschild – This is the remix.  I’ve updated their classic quotations for the modern investment world.  Vote for your favorites below…Enjoy!

“We simply attempt to be greedy when others are fearful and to make others fearful when we do not have enough long positions on our sheets.” – Warren Buffett

“Capital goes to where it can escape taxation and be used to pay employees in sacks of rice.” – Walter Wriston

“Stock market bubbles don’t grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in the creation and marketing of ETFs.” – George Soros

“It takes 150 years to build an investment bank and only five minutes to convince you to sell me preferred stock in it at a 10% interest rate.” – Warren Buffett

“The four most dangerous words in investing are ‘It’s the Lightning Round!'”. – Sir John Templeton

“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market had a Flash Crash.” – Warren Buffett

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can pretend that Treasuries yielding a half a percent are a safe buy.” – John Maynard Keynes

“History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of my policies” – Alan Greenspan

“Obviously the thing to do was to be bullish in a bull market and bearish in a bear market and a renter in the housing market and open-minded to exotic sh*t at Jean-Georges’ Spice Market.” – Jesse Livermore

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not how much it owes China.” – Mayer Amschel Rothschild

“Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man gets a text message, an eFax and two Twitter DMs.  And by the time he’s updating his Facebook status and feeding his virtual farm animals, he has no idea what ‘abyss’ you’re talking about.” – Lou Mannheim, Wall Street

“How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?  How about around 2007 when I was walking around with a crown and a scepter, spraying Crystal on chicks in the VIP room. I was probably a little irrationally exuberant right around then, holmes.” – Alan Greenspan

“Money is like manure, you don’t have to spread it around, you can just sell it to Potash Corp as fertilizer.” – J. Paul Getty

“The time of maximum optimism is the time to sell and the time of maximum pessimism is the time to start a blog and write 20 posts a day about gold.” – Sir John Templeton

“Rule No. 1 – Never Lose Money.  Rule No. 2 – When you do lose money, call in Becky Quick and the camera crew for some folksy chit chat over root beer floats.” – Warren Buffett

Cost of Mistakes

Overconfidence is a very serious problem, but you probably don’t think it affects you. That’s the tricky thing with overconfidence: the people who are most overconfident are the ones least likely to recognize it. We tend to think of it as someone else’s problem.

When it comes to investing, however, we all have a problem.

As we become more and more confident we become willing to take on more and more risk. Why? We start seeing risky behavior as, well, less risky. But the reality is that as the level of overconfidence increases, the cost of our mistakes increase as well. (more…)

MRI’s of Succesful Traders

I’ve seen this study making the rounds on several websites now as a type of neuroeconomic confirmation of Buffetological principles…

Perhaps procedure might be slightly useful as a means of seeing physical brain improvement by training– such as that found through meditative practices.

“Traders who buy more aggressively based on NAcc signals earn less. High-earning traders have early warning signals in the anterior insular cortex before prices reach a peak, and sell coincidently with that signal, precipitating the crash. These experiments could help understand other cases in which human groups badly miscompute the value of actions or events.”

“Neuroeconomists Confirm Warren Buffet’s Wisdom”:

“Seeing what’s going on in people’s brains when they are trading suggests that Buffett was right on target,” says Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech.

That is because in their experimental markets, Camerer and his colleagues found two distinct types of activity in the brains of participants—one that made a small fraction of participants nervous and prompted them to sell their experimental shares even as prices were on the rise, and another that was much more common and made traders behave in a greedy way, buying aggressively during the bubble and even after the peak. The lucky few who received the early warning signal got out of the market early, ultimately causing the bubble to burst, and earned the most money. The others displayed what former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance” and lost their proverbial shirts.