11 Comments
User's avatar
Sara's avatar

Thank you, Kris!

Kristopher Rymer's avatar

You're welcome. Thanks for sharing such an excellent article!

James | Slack Capital's avatar

Great article! Do you have any recommended books?

Sara's avatar

Thank you, James! I have some recommendations on the psych behind investment/trading. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb is a great one! Are you looking for any particular topic? Maybe I can give you more accurate recos based on that.

James | Slack Capital's avatar

Thanks Sara! I will check out that book. Would love to hear any recommendations of books/articles towards buying into a stock, having patience and not letting eagerness jump out too early. I mostly invest in small-cap stocks with low liquidity and so I need to control myself in the accumulation phase

Sara's avatar

Investors deal with time risk on a much larger scale than traders so patience is truly a key thing.

A great book on this is Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. In the book Edwin tells the story of Jesse Livermore when he realized that entering too soon wasn’t so much a matter of price, more about the risk of waiting for the move to happen while tying up capital in a position that might not move for weeks or months.

I strongly recommend Bret Steenbarger's TraderFeed blog (https://traderfeed.blogspot.com/) where he covers multiple topics related to patience in a practical fashion. Try to make a google search with "Bret Steenbarger TraderFeed patience" and all the articles he wrote on the topic will show up.

I hope you find it useful!

James | Slack Capital's avatar

What a reply! Thanks so much

Kristopher Rymer's avatar

I will let Sara answer this one since she wrote the article.

Kristopher Rymer's avatar

@Sara can answer this…

The Fringe Finance Report's avatar

I completely agree with you: "Separate emotions from investment decisions."

Behavioral finance (where finance meets psychology) is still one of my favorite topics.

When I read it for the first time—a long time ago—I could find the source of so many of my early investment mistakes.

My standing advice for anyone wanting to go into investments, in addition to learning the investment basics, is to study behavioral finance.

Learning through reading is A LOT cheaper than learning through bad investment choices.

Sara's avatar

That's a great discipline, I love the psychology behind things, and investing is deeply rooted in it. An investor who truly understands their own mental framework and how it influences their decisions is far better equipped than someone who focuses solely on the investment itself.