Behavioral Finance and Investor Decision Making: What You Need to Know as a Practitioner

It is well known that the performance of the average investor's portfolio dramatically underperforms market benchmarks. This is due in large part to well known psychological characteristics that govern investor decision making. In this interactive workshop, Greg will lead participants through the most important of these "biases and heuristics," explaining the research and providing tools that will help financial advisors and financial planners to work better with clients and have more productive conversations about investment policy. Topics will include such phenomena as the availability and representativeness heuristics, loss aversion, overconfidence, anchoring and framing, inattention blindness, familiarity bias, inertia, and herding. We will also explore the implications of this research for understanding financial markets in general.