In his keynote address Dr. Howard Rossman of Mesirow Advanced Strategies in Chicago, talked about the psychology of success.
In the past 30 years the hedge fund industry has grown up and achieved spectacular success as well as spectacular failures. Behavioural economics and psychology can help us learn from these success and failures, said Rossman.
Rossman argued that investing is actually a business of decision-making and that discipline and procedures enhance the probability of success. “Good decision-making is not a trait, it is a state which fluctuates,” he said, noting that we ignore our decision-making errors at our peril.
Rossman explained to a packed auditorium that research into decision-making shows that people have unconscious routines and make implicit assumptions that allow us to take short-cuts in order for our minds to make sense of information easily. “We are creatures of habit and we like status quo,” he explained.
This...