Rational Markets and Herd Behavior
Somehow this video says a lot about the action we are witnessing today. ES futures up 55 handles in less than 20 hours. I buy, you buy, I buy, you buy, I sell…. People’s psychology does not change.
Psychology and Herd Behavior
Guest post by Macro Story;
Trader psychology is arguably one of the most important aspects of a successful trader yet one seldom understood let alone studied. In the book Beyond Greed And Fear (Hersh Shefrin) I found two interesting discussions relevant to the current market.
Most traders view themselves as above average, able to move independent of others with superior skills.
“In a survey, drivers were asked how good a driver are you. Relative to the drivers you encounter on the road you are (a) above average, (b) average or (c) below average. Between 65 and 80 percent of the people who answer the driver question rate themselves above average. Of course we all want to be above average but only half of us are.”
Gambler’s fallacy
“People have very poor intuition about the behavior of random events. With gambler’s fallacy, they expect reversals to occur more frequently than actually happens.
I usually divide students in my MBA classes into two groups. I ask everyone in the first group to take a coin, toss it one hundred times, and record the sequence of heads and tails that result. I ask everyone in the second group to imagine that they are tossing a coin, and to record the outcome of an imaginary sequence of one hundred tosses.
Then I collect the responses of each group and analyze each student’s response according to the number and length of the runs (consecutive heads or tails). What is the point? The imaginary tossers do not generate enough long runs as compared to the actual tossers.
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