How To Choose Your Investment Mindset

Emotions and biases often dictate our investment decisions. We must understand and control them to achieve better financial outcomes

- Narayan Krishnamurthy

A long-term investor who has been investing for over a decade in the markets decided to redeem most of his investments at the end of March 2020 because he felt the Covid-19-induced lockdowns were the end of markets as he knew them. A retired school teacher who had never invested before decided to put all her money in the stock markets earlier this year because someone told her the cooperative bank where she had parked her money was unsafe.

Why do investors behave as they do? Investor behaviour often deviates from logic and reason. A lot goes into individual decision-making—emotions, our personality, past experience and biases. Even for return-obsessed investors, decisions on where and how they invest involve a lot more than just numbers. The human mind is biologically incapable of complete objectivity. A large part of investing involves individual behaviour, which in turn depends on investor emotions and beliefs. For instance, we are all attracted to the stock markets after they go up significantly and also after chatter comes from unexpected sources.

According to William Bernstein, an American neurologist and investment author, we like looking for established patterns even when we know that finance is statistically quite unpredictable. He says there is a part of our brain that makes us invest based on past information. It is for this reason that even though the younger generation is likely to make independent life choices, they often tend to follow investment patterns followed by their parents. It is also why a risk-taking, career-hopping youngster invests conservatively in fixed return instruments when you expect them to consider equity investing.