Learn From Your Investment Mistakes

Every one makes investment mistakes. From the time we were born, we learned from the mistakes we made. As investors, we need to learn from our investment mistakes by recognizing when we make them and make the appropriate adjustments to our investing discipline. When we make a losing investment, do we recognize our investing mistake and learn from it, or do we attribute it to some outside factor, like bad luck or the market? To make money from your investments and beat the market, we must recognize our investing mistakes and then learn from them. Unfortunately, learning from these investing mistakes is much harder than it seems.

Some of you may have heard of this experiment. It is an example of a failure to learn from investing mistakes during a simple game devised by Antoine Bechara. Each player received $20. They had to make a decision on each round of the game: invest $1 or not invest. If the decision was not to invest, the task advanced to the next round. If the decision was to invest, players would hand over one dollar to the experimenter. The experimenter would then toss a coin in view of the players. If the outcome was heads, the player lost the dollar. If the outcome landed tails up then $2.50 was added to the player’s account. The task would then move to the next round. Overall, 20 rounds were played.

In this study there was no evidence of learning as the game went on. As the game progressed, the number of players who elected to play another round fell to just over 50%. If players learned over time, they would have realized that it was optimal to invest in all rounds. However, as the game went on, fewer and fewer players made decisions to invest. They were actually becoming worse with each round. When they lost, they assumed they made an investing mistake and decided to not play the next time.

So how do we learn from our investing mistakes? What techniques can we use to overcome our “bad” behavior and become better investors? The major reason we don’t learn from our mistakes (or the mistakes of others) is that we simply don’t recognize them as such. We have a gamut of mental devices set up to protect us from the terrible truth that we regularly make mistakes. We also become afraid to invest, when we have a losing experience, as in the experiment above. Let’s look at several of the investing mistake behaviors we need to overcome.

I Knew That

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. As a Monday morning quarterback, we can always say we would have made the right decision. Looking again at the experiment mentioned above, it is easy to say, “I knew that, so I would have invested on each flip of the dice”. So why didn’t everyone do just that? In my opinion, they let their emotions rule over logical decision-making. Maybe their last several trades were losers, so they decided it was an investing mistake and they become afraid to experience another losing trade.

The advantage of hindsight is we can employ logic as we evaluate the decision we should have made. This allows us to avoid the emotion that gets in our way. Emotion is one of the most common investing mistake and it is the worst enemy of any good investor. To help overcome this emotion, I recommend that every investor write down the reason you are making the decision to invest. Documenting the logic used to make an investment decision goes a long way to remove the emotion that leads to investment mistakes. To me the idea is to get into the position where you can say “I know that” rather than I knew that. By removing the emotion from your decision, you are using the logic you typically use in hindsight to your advantage.

Self Congratulations

Whenever we make a winning investment, we congratulate ourselves for making such a good decision based on our investing prowess. However, if the investment goes bad, then we often blame it on bad luck. According to psychologists, this is a natural mechanism that we, as humans possess. As investors, it is a bad trait to have as it leads to additional investing mistakes.

To combat this unfortunate human trait, I have found that I must document each of my trades, especially the reason I am making the decision. I can then assess my decisions based on the outcome. Was I right for the right reason? If so, then I can claim some skill, it could still be luck, but at least I can claim skill. Was I right for some spurious reason? In which case I will keep the result because it makes me a profit, but I shouldn’t fool myself into thinking that I really knew what I was doing. I need to analyze what I missed.

Was I wrong for the wrong reason? I made an investing mistake, I need to learn from it, or was I wrong for the right reason? After all, bad luck does occur. Only by analyzing my investment decisions and the reasons for those decisions, can I hope to learn from my investing mistakes. This is an important step toward building genuine investment skill.

Luck Becomes Insight

The market is comprised of a series of cause and effect actions, which are not always transparent. This cause and effect has created some interesting behaviors by some very successful people. For example, some baseball pitchers are known to not step on the white chalk line when they are playing. I am sure you have heard of many “superstitions” that people hold to be true to help them perform well.

In an experiment by Koichi Ono’s in 1987, subjects were asked to earn points in response to a signal light. They could pull three levers, though they were not told to do anything in particular. They could see their score on a counter, but did not know that points were awarded completely independent of what they did. Nothing they did influenced the outcome in terms of points awarded. During the experiment, they observed some odd behavior as the participants tried to make the most points possible. Most subjects developed superstitious behavior, mainly in patterns of lever pulling, but in some cases, they performed elaborate or even strenuous actions. Each of these superstitions began with a coincidence. In some cases, the participants would pull levers in a particular sequence. In other cases, even more odd behavior was observed, including a person who jumped off a table and then later jumped up to touch the ceiling to “score” points. Keep in mind the points were awarded either on a fixed time schedule or on a variable time schedule, not based on the action of the participant.

The point of this is that as humans we tend to think that luck is insight. We fail to analyze effectively the situation and the real reason for our success or failure. In investing this behavior will lead to ruin. To help overcome our natural tendency, we must document our investing decisions and then assess the results. This assessment process helps us learn from our success and from our failures and is critical for each of us if we hope to become successful investors.

Learn from Investment Mistakes

To help avoid investing mistakes, what should you document before you make an trade? I like to look at three categories regarding a stock I am considering. First, I look at a series of fundamental information such as earnings yield, return on capital, revenue growth, insider holdings, sector, and free cash flow. The fundamental information helps me identify if this is a good company with growing earnings, good management and has potential. After reviewing the appropriate financial information including SEC documents, I identify the risks inherent in the company. These risks might include competition, market share, insider transactions, and any litigation that the company is experiencing. Here one needs to try to identify every possible risk and assess them critically. Finally, I look at the chart of the stock, seeking to identify support and resistance zones. This gives me potential entry points, exit targets, and the trailing stop loss. I complete these sections with a written trading strategy describing how I expect to make my trades. All these investment factors should be documented before making a trade. Once the trade is complete, I review them to see what I can learn so I can avoid any investing mistakes in the future.

To learn from our investing mistakes, we need to document our actions before we make the decision. We also need to be honest with ourselves when assessing our results. As we have seen, it is quite easy for each of us to put on rose-colored glasses and think we are better investors than we really are. We need to assess critically our investing abilities without distorting the feedback we receive from our decisions. Those of us who are able to learn this valuable skill will benefit greatly. Those of us who are unable to apply this learning will be destined to mediocrity at best and likely lose much of their capital before they quite investing.

Hans E. Wagner
I began investing in high school and have remained active in the markets. A graduate of the US Air Force Academy with an MBA majoring in Finance from the University of Colorado, I continued to invest throughout my career in the US Air Force, Bank of America, Coopers & Lybrand, and working for Ross Perot before retiring at 55. During that time I have gained a very good understanding of what works and what doesn’t. I hope to impart that knowledge to others so they can achieve financial independence as well.

Online Home Based Business Tips

There are some tips you can use to help you have a successful home based business. It is important to find a business opportunity that will allow you to use your talent, skills and hopefully your work and education history. It is also ideal to find a business opportunity in an area of interest to you. Your home based business is likely to become an even bigger part of your life than any job you ever worked. You want to be able to have a home business doing something you enjoy.You need an area to work that is separate from the main living area whenever possible. If you have a house with an extra bedroom or any other type of room, you should set up your work base and office in there. Sometimes it is not possible to dedicate an entire room to an office. In cases such as these, you will want to find a corner of a room where you can keep your work items and computer. Make certain that your family knows that they are not allowed to touch your work papers and computer. You should definitely have a computer that is for business use only.Determine what hours you will work from home. Yes, one of your reason for running a home based business is probably flexible hours. However, you should still have particular days and hours in which you try to work. This will help you to stay organized and to stay on task when you need to complete jobs for a clients. If you have a family, you need to get them on board with your home based business plans. Make certain that they understand the commitment and hard work that you will need to put into running your home based business. You will need your family to be supportive of your plans if your home based business is going to work.Sometimes it is best to start out small and slow when you are launching a new home based business. You might want to tinker with your business ideas a few hours per week in the beginning. You can continue your regular job until you feel it is time to run your home based business full-time. In the beginning, you might want to just take on a few clients so that you can get a feel for interacting with clients and filling orders and completing jobs.Try not to ever give up hope on your home based business. If your business is not doing well, do not give up right away. Try to determine if there are any changes or modifications that you can make to your business to help improve the success of your business. You might find that a few small changes will save your business if you remain motivated and hopeful. Take your time to think through your home based business ideas. When you identify the business you want to start, you will want to write out a marketing and business plan. Put the time in that is needed to carefully get your business off the ground.

How To Succeed At Online Product Creation The Easy Way

Product creation could be a frightening subject for a lot of Internet marketers to face. Some folks who get in the game with the intention of making a full time income are completely ignorant as to how an online business operates. One of the most profitable ways to create online cash is by creating a product that others are happy to pay for.

Product creation is legitimate method of generating money through internet marketing but many entrepreneurs get it wrong. They start by imitating their Internet marketing gurus by creating information products on Internet marketing in hopes of getting rich the way their heroes did. The problem is that they usually don’t know what they are doing and enter a highly competitive niche with very little marketing experience or connections.

Here are a few tips for effective product creation that may help you get on the right track:
Start by finding a profitable niche with low to moderate competition. If you conduct some rudimentary market research and keyword research, you’ll find many opportunities in areas that will surprise you. Amazon and eBay are two great places to brainstorm for product ideas.

Developing Your Product does not have to be a difficult project. You can find experts in the right field for your niche and pay them to write the material while an artist designs the packaging and website or blog. You can outsource the entire product creation part of the project after you conduct the research and testing to ensure profitability.

Sales and marketing strategies should be created while developing the product and learning about the market. Some experienced marketers use pay per click to drive traffic to their offer page; some folks outsource the entire marketing campaign to affiliates through ClickBank or other affiliate programs.

Product creation does not need to be hard, particularly when the merchandise is electronic. E-books, videos, audio and multi-media products sell very well. They are distributed immediately to customers electronically. Once you have a good feel for a niche market, try to service your customers with associated products and upgrades. If you want to earn money online through product creation, you must understand supply and demand. The majority of new online marketers fail miserably because they go after highly competitive markets or forget to research their chosen niche properly. You have to create your products according to the needs, wants and desires of the prospective customers.