Het vermijden van de Vallen van de Beer
De emoties van mensen brengen hen ertoe om slechte financiële bewegingen in chaotische tijden te maken. Hier is wat om te kijken uit voor. In een chaotische baissemarkt als dit één, is het gemakkelijk voor investeerders om in vallen te lopen. Zij zouden kunnen door elkaar gooien om handel die op de recentste nieuwsrapporten te maken wordt gebaseerd. Zij zouden naar een mirakelvoorraad kunnen zoeken die groot zal betalen en hen al hun verliezen zal laten vergoeden. Of zij zouden in de andere richting kunnen gaan - en worden zo doen schrikken van de markt dat zij enige bewegingen helemaal niet maken.
„ik geloof dat de frequentie van irrationeel investeerdersgedrag samen met marktvluchtigheid uitgaat,“ zeg Chris Blum, hoofd van de V.S. gedrags-financiën groep voor JP Morgan Funds in New York, dat bestudeert hoe de emoties van mensen hun financiële besluiten beïnvloeden.
Gelukkig, zullen een weinig logica en gezond verstand u van deze pitfalls duidelijk houden. Hier is een blik op sommige gemeenschappelijke missteps - en hoe te om hen te vermijden.
De val van de Waarde: Een chaotische markt maakt het voor investeerders gemakkelijker om te overtuigen dat omdat een voorraad - of een sector of een markt - goedkoop is, het een grote waarde is. Soms, niettemin, is er een goede reden dat een voorraad of een sector goedkoop zijn: Het is in probleem. U moet voorbij de aandeelprijs of de waardevaststelling kijken en de grondbeginselen van het bedrijf, de industrie en de economie onderzoeken alvorens u besluit dat iets een koopje is.
„Binnen de industrieën, niet zijn alle bedrijven gecre�ërde gelijke; sommigen zullen gaan beter dan anderen,“ M. zeggen. Blum. Het is door onderzoek, niet instinct of voorraadprijs, dat de investeerders de echte waarden ontdekken, voegt hij toe.
De val van het Risico: De één redeninvesteerders zijn zo kwetsbaar aan de waardeval is dat een andere kracht op het werk - de drang is om verliezen te vergoeden. De investeerders die wanhopig zijn om terug wat te maken van wat zij en terugkeer aan „normaal“ hebben verloren zijn meer bereid om enorme weddenschappen op individuele voorraden of eng geconcentreerde uitwisseling-handel gedreven fondsen te nemen.
Maar die benadering kan meer waarschijnlijk niet in dit marktmilieu werken; 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.
