Secrets of Finances and Payday Loans

Tversky and Kahneman  and Shiller  argue that the assumption of rational, utility-maximizing behavior of investors is frequently violated in real life. They also show that these anomalies can be predicted and that they result from the use of simple heuristics to facilitate the process of decision-making. Sophisticated investors can benefit from this fact if they [...]

Geopolitical risks like war and terror can create stress scenarios for all risky asset classes. The geopolitical situation has a strong impact on the risk aversion of investors. The events of September 11, 2001, provide a tragic example after which investors bought safe haven assets such as government bonds and gold at the cost of [...]

Market participants often cite changes in investors’ risk appetite as a possible explanation for developments in global financial markets that cannot be explained by changes of market fundamentals. Indeed, financial crises often seem to coincide with abrupt shifts in market sentiment from risk tolerance to risk avoidance. While fundamentals undoubtedly remain of significant importance, these [...]

Web portals promote thoughtless online trading. Web portals are paid  by online brokers for each customer they send to the broker. Portals run  “news” stories about stocks and then include links in the story to online  brokers where you can quickly buy or sell the stock. If you give credence to  printed material formatted as [...]

Fortunately, comfort zone investing does not require you to be as straitlaced as relationship maturity might. Unlike marriage, multiple partners are fine in investing. Just be sure you know your needs and which investments fill those needs. If your need to conform at work is strong but you also know you need investments that you [...]

A third explanation for humanity’s history of rotten economic performance may be failure to understand value. Modern economic theory has conclusively shown that value cannot be created when the returns of economic endeavor fail to exceed the cost of capital. This knowledge has been derived from efficient capital markets linked by rapid communications. Under these [...]

It is equally useful to examine the transformation processes by which these assets are converted to value. Consider first a hypothetical example of how important a seemingly mundane intellectual asset such as validated test procedures can be. Professor Stern, who teaches chemistry at a small college in Delaware, has synthesized and patented a new molecule, [...]

Broadly speaking, transfer payments are taxes paid by one sector of a population that are transferred as income to another sector. Today, the term is synonymous with welfare—income taxes paid by the working population are transferred to the poor, the aged, and the disabled, usually to ensure a decent standard of living to all citizens. [...]