Beware the Market Slap

To succeed in investing, don’t become fixated by your own success.

What follows is a true and factual story. A University in the US did an experiment to understand more about the psychology of success. This experiment has subsequently been repeated a number of times at different places and by different people.

The experiment involved getting people to guess the outcome of tossing a coin. You know how it goes, I toss the coin, you guess the outcome and then you are either right or wrong.

Let me ask you a question, if the coin were tossed 500 times how many times would you expect to guess the outcome correctly? That’s right around 250 times or 50% of the time. It doesn’t matter how clever you are or hard you concentrate the outcome is determined by the laws of probability. Just about everyone understands this and knows it.

What you may not be aware of is that in the 500 tosses there is a fairly good chance that you will put together three or four runs of guessing five tosses in a row correctly. And here is where the psychology of success takes hold. What the university experiment did was asked the people guessing the outcome of the toss how they felt about their performance at various times.

What they found was that when people were having successful runs – four or five or six correct guesses in a row – that they believed that they themselves were responsible for this success. Reasons ranged from, I am getting better at this, to I am now concentrating harder and that is improving my performance.

Let’s stop right here. People who know that the outcome of a guess is based on a strict 50% probabilistic outcome believe that when they have a few guesses correct in a row that it is because of their talent and ability. How scary is that.

Yet this happens with people investing in the stock market all the time – especially people new to investing and trading. After a winning trade or two or three, the investor or trader begins to believe that they have a special “talent” for stocks and shares. They begin to believe that they are naturally better than the average trader.

Before long, the investor or trader’s belief in their own superior ability begins to result in over confidence – trading too many stocks or trading without properly managing the risk. And the next thing that happens is the Market Slap! The stock market has a nasty habit of slapping down over confident traders with a big loss.

The truth here is that every trade involves risk and every trader should be managing risk. This means protecting your capital and not getting carried away with your successes.

Beware the Market Slap!