Man in the Mirror

It’s been awhile since I’ve been this excited for a new blog. Except the blogger himself is by no means new to the game. My friend Brendan Mullooly has been writing for years (along with his father and brothers) on the blog of their firm’s website. Much like I felt the itch a few years ago to create a site of my own in addition to the content I was creating for Huber Financial Advisors, Brendan has felt the same urge to put himself out there and take the plunge.

The premise of his first post is great, asking an assortment of other financial bloggers and professionals the following question:

What do you consider to be your biggest behavioral bias (as it pertains to investing or personal finance) and how do you work to control it?

Here is the response I provided:

I think my biggest behavioral biases stem from the sheer fact that I entered the industry right as the Great Financial Crisis was starting to unfold. Try as I might, it is difficult not to anchor to this type of experience and overweight in my head the likelihood of such events occurring again in the future. How this has manifested itself in my own personal investing experience is twofold. First, I haven’t been as aggressive as I should have in putting additional money to work during equity market corrections. That said, I max out my retirement savings every year and have no idea what the password is to my 401k site so I’m never tempted to check performance or tweak the allocation. My taxable investments is where I play the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” game a lot more. Fortunately, I have gotten better over the years about automating and dollar-cost-averaging into that part of my portfolio. The second major impact the crisis has had is my overall asset allocation. I place a greater emphasis on uncorrelated, diversifying investments than I imagine most of my peers of a similar age do. While some of these exposures have acted as a drag on performance the last few years, I still remain a proponent of “diversifying your diversifiers” given how much of my career risk and equity in my company are tied to the stock market.

Check out the link below for the full post and some great responses from the likes of Josh Brown, Michael Kitces, Jim O’Shaughnessy, Morgan Housel and many more! (And if you’re not already following Brendan on Twitter, go ahead and fix that.)

A Mirror Onto Ourselves (Your Brain on Stocks)