Beware Mr Market

January 31, 2011

Thinking of the market as having a personality can be fun and educational.  But it has a dark side as well.

Benjamin Graham

The idea of Mr Market was created by Benjamin Graham as a way of conveying the wisdom of fundamental analysis.

Graham’s intentions were to make people act more rationally.  Ironically, thinking of Mr Market may encourage people to act less rationally.

Intentionality

Markets may or may not have streaks but Mr Market will be held to have intentions.  We humans seem to think streaks will continue when we anthropomorphize the process.  Several experiments along these lines are reported in The intentional mind and the hot hand: Perceiving intentions makes streaks seem likely to continue.

Leave a Reply

Related posts

  • November 9, 2010

    The game ARORA (A random or real array) is a website that gives you two time series at a time. Your job is to guess which series is real [...]

  • October 28, 2010

    We'll get to "antisocial" via a look at a chapter in The Future of Finance from the London School of Economics. The chapter in question is "Why are financial [...]

  • October 26, 2010

    This arrives via Marginal Revolution. But note that there is a check mark missing: Psychic fund management.