The idea of complex adaptive systems might sound overwhelming, but an experiment conducted by physicist Per Bak makes the concept easier to understand. If you drop one grain of sand at a time onto an empty table, a small, cone-shaped pile begins to form. As the pile...
As the stock market continues to reach new highs, it’s tempting to think about the possibility of buying and selling at just the right moment. Here’s a dirty little secret that most of the investment industry doesn’t want you to know: Time is more important than...
All too often, people make money decisions without the end in mind. In fact, the neural patterns resulting from thinking about our future self greatly resemble the neural patterns from thinking about a stranger. In other words, our brains think of saving like a choice...
Imagine The Wall Street Journal ran a contest for its subscribers in which each subscriber viewed 100 photos of various men and women. To participate in the contest, each subscriber must pick the six most attractive people. The subscriber that choses the photos voted...
Stop looking at your portfolio. The Digital Age has made access to stock market data and real-time portfolio values increasingly easy, but it causes investors to lose sight of the big picture as their mental time horizon shortens to match the frequency of feedback...
