Éviter les pièges d'ours
Les émotions des personnes les mènent à entreprendre de mauvaises démarches financières dans des périodes chaotiques. Voici pour ce qu'à regarder dehors. Sur un marché chaotique d'ours il aime celui-ci, il est facile pour des investisseurs tomber dans des pièges. Ils pourraient brouiller pour faire les commerces basés sur les rapports de dernières nouvelles. Ils pourraient rechercher des actions de miracle qui payeront au loin grand et les laissent récupérer toutes leurs pertes. Ou ils pourraient aller dans l'autre direction - et obtenir ainsi effrayé du marché qu'ils ne font pas à aucun mouvement du tout.
« Je crois que la fréquence du comportement irrationnel d'investisseur monte avec la volatilité du marché, » dit Chris Blum, tête des États-Unis comportemental-financez le groupe pour des fonds de JP Morgan à New York, qui étudie comment les émotions des personnes affectent leurs décisions financières.
Heureusement, un peu de logique et de bon sens vous garderont espace libre de ces pièges. Voici un regard à quelques pas communs - et comment les éviter.
Le piège de valeur : Un marché chaotique le facilite pour que les investisseurs se convainquent que parce que des actions - ou un secteur ou un marché - sont bon marché, c'est une grande valeur. Parfois, bien que, il y a une bonne raison pour laquelle des actions ou un secteur sont bon marché : Il est dans l'ennui. Vous devez regarder après le cours ou l'évaluation d'actions et examiner les principes fondamentaux de la compagnie, de l'industrie et de l'économie avant que vous décidiez que quelque chose est une affaire.
« Dans des industries, non toutes les compagnies sont égale créée ; une partie prix de volonté meilleur que d'autres, » indique M. Blum. Il est par la recherche, pas instinct ou cours des actions d'actions, que les investisseurs découvrent les valeurs réelles, il ajoute.
Le piège de risque : Les investisseurs d'une raison sont si vulnérable au piège de valeur est qu'une autre force est au travail - le recommander de récupérer des pertes. Les investisseurs qui sont désespérés pour en faire en arrière de ce qu'elles ont perdu et la « normale » de retour sont plus disposés à prendre des paris de dimension hors-série sur différents stocks ou fonds échanger-commercés étroitement focalisés.
Mais il est bien plus peu susceptible travailler cette approche dans cet environnement du marché ; the combination of the credit crunch and the recession have made the stock market dangerously volatile. A concentrated portfolio is especially risky, advisers argue.
Investors can’t accept that individual stocks, or stocks overall, aren’t likely to deliver a reliable stream of double-digit profits each year as in the past, says Bill Schultheis, a partner at Soundmark Wealth Management LLC, a financial-planning firm in Kirkland, Washington.
To combat the risk trap, Mr. Schultheis spends a lot of time preaching the virtues of investment basics like diversification and building returns steadily through compound interest and dividends.
The Scapegoat Trap: Like the children in humorist Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, people believe they are all above average — at investing. Overconfidence makes it easy to blame your financial adviser for your outsize losses last year, and to think you’d be better off making the big decisions yourself.
But that attitude ignores a basic fact: In this market, nearly everyone is in the same boat, more or less, regardless of who’s managing their money. Ditching your professional help and going it alone is a bad idea.
“There are certainly some financial advisers out there who weren’t good at what they did, but the worst mistake someone can make is to fire that individual and decide to do it all themselves instead of finding someone better,” says Mr. Blum.
The reality, he says, is that few investors have the time, patience or expertise needed to develop asset-allocation plans and manage diversified portfolios. “Firing a specific adviser may be rational; deciding to be your own financial adviser probably isn’t,” he says.
The Paralysis Trap: The market debacle has left many investors too terrified to act at all, whether to sell portfolio holdings to limit losses or take advantage of what may be appealing long-term investment opportunities. Some advisers report clients in their 30s and early 40s shunning stocks altogether, when the real risk that they face is likely to be inflation — which may eat up their money if they keep it out of riskier investments that are likely to trounce rising inflation rates over the next decade or two.
“The chance of suffering more pain is so intense that they can’t imagine a world that will be better,” says Joe Sheehan, a partner at Moneta Group, a wealth-management firm in St. Louis. “Two years ago, they would have jumped at the chance to buy more of stocks they already owned at these low prices; now they are frozen in place and won’t respond.”
Mr. Sheehan tries to persuade clients of a simple fact: The world hasn’t changed dramatically enough to justify paralysis. “About 92% of Americans are still employed; the S&P 500 is not going to zero,” he says.
Mr. Sheehan finds himself pointing to psychological studies showing that people tend to rely too heavily on what has happened in the recent past when it comes to predicting the future. “That’s one reason we’re in this mess in the first place,” he says.
Among other things, he notes, investors and homeowners believed that housing prices could only go up — leading to the bubble that got millions of homeowners in horrible financial trouble.
The Comfort Trap: “When people are fearful, Wall Street comes out with a product that tries to make you feel good by promising you safety,” says Andrew Mehalko, chief investment officer of GenSpring Family Offices LLC in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
For instance, Mr. Mehalko expects one of the hottest-selling products this year to be principal-protected notes, just as they were after the bear market of 2001-02. While these vehicles — which promise to preserve your principal investment — may provide reassurance, they often also come with hefty fees and can sharply limit your upside potential.
As a general rule, a low-risk strategy will produce minimal returns. So, while you may feel the urge to lock up all your capital in ultrasafe strategies, you need to be prepared to invest some of it in riskier products.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sheehan reports that some of his clients have even developed an aversion to mortgages. That may be rational for people with no nest egg or a job that’s at risk, but it’s not something that everyone should be worrying about.
“It’s not logical at all,” he says, because some have relatively little mortgage debt relative to home value, hold long-term fixed mortgages at the relatively low rate of 5% or so and gain from the tax deduction for mortgage interest.
Yet “all they want to do is pay off that mortgage,” to get rid of “this toxic thing — a mortgage,” he says.
The Chasing-the-News Trap: If you’re a financial-news junkie, it’s tempting to try to react to each twist and turn of the market. But the best thing you can do is turn off the news, put the remote control down on the coffee table and step away from your television set.
In times like these — an almost unbelievably volatile stock market, a distorted bond market and an economic meltdown — newshounds can do tremendous damage to their portfolios. Trying to judge exactly the right moment to get into the market — and then jump out again a day or two later — is likely to leave you with big headaches and outsize trading expenses.
An “atmosphere of constant, breathless hysteria” isn’t conducive to making smart investing moves, says Carol Clark, an investment principal at Lowry Hill, a wealth-management firm in Minneapolis. “That’s not what long-term investing is all about.
“Many of those [300-point] interday moves simply don’t make a lot of sense in the first place, so how can it be sensible to try and respond to them?” she asks.
Instead of acting on every new development, it’s better to look past the noise and invest small amounts regularly, an approach known as dollar-cost averaging. A strategy based on a solid asset-allocation plan and dollar-cost averaging is more likely to lead to sustainable gains over the longer haul.
Ms. Clark offers one final observation. Usually, investors find themselves in traps “because your emotions have run away with your logical thinking,” she says. “You need to find ways to start thinking logically again.”
Sometimes it helps to do something as simple as making a list of your investment goals and putting it on the refrigerator. Whenever you’re tempted to act impulsively in response to something you see on television or hear from a friend at a dinner party, you can go back to that list and remind yourself that yanking money out of the market may not be the best strategy.
“Then, when you feel an urge to turn on CNBC, you train yourself to look at the list instead,” she says.
