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How Fear and Greed Can Affect Your Investing

Wall Street Wisdom / By Kirk Chisholm / 02/15/2022

Financial Markets are driven by emotions: Fear and Greed

Master your investing emotions, or they will master you

The stock and bond markets are driven by four primary motivations. These four motivations are based on only 2 emotions, fear and greed. Investing is scary if you don’t know what you are doing. It is even scarier if you fully understand the risks through your own experience. Fear is a primal and instinctual emotion. Fear has kept our species from getting eaten by sabertooth tigers and jumping off cliffs trying to fly like a bird.

However when it comes to investing, that same primal instinct clouds the judgment of an otherwise rational educated person and causes him or her to make silly mistakes. In order to be successful as an investor, that fear has to be understood and harnessed in a productive way. I find fear to be the trickier of the two emotions because most people don’t understand how it applies to their own psychology.

Fear: The two fears of investing

The emotion of fear when investing can be broken down into 2 subcategories: Fear of losing money, and fear of under-performing the market (or more commonly known as, the fear of under-performing your friends).

Why are Individual Investors so Bad at Investing?

Individual Investors Need Help

Individual investors as a group have no idea what they are doing. This has been made clear by a recent DALBAR study spanning 30 years all the way back to 1984.¹ This period covers a number of bull and bear markets, giving investors a chance to learn from their mistakes. However it is clear that they are not learning the lessons of proper investing.

The S&P 500 is one of the most widely followed indices and is considered a benchmark for the US stock market. I would consider it a suitable benchmark for this study. These numbers compiled by DALBAR show that the return of the S&P 500 over the 30 year period ending in December 2013 is 11.11%. They also show that individual investors only measured 3.69% over that same period of time. This is a remarkable 7.42% difference annually. To put this in perspective, if you invested $100,000 in 1984 in the S&P 500 and earned 11.11%, today (30 years later) you would have $2,358,275. If you started with $100,000 and invested it over the same time period at 3.69%, you would have $296,556. That is a difference of $2,061,719. It should be clear from these numbers that individual investors have a problem.

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