Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Your Money and Your Brain

Great piece on CNBC today that I caught over lunch. A guy named Jason Zweig has written a book about how your brain gets involved in investing. It is a field called neuro-economics. His basic point is that when a market crashes people often either get frozen or panic and sell everything. He comments how much of our investing is emotional and driven by fear, greed, exuberence etc. Good stuff. I did find a link (Jason Zweig, Money Magazine: Your money and your brain).

I think this touches on one of the biggest advantages of MFI, is that it is designed to take the emotions out of investment decisions. I'll be the 1st to admit that I am human and do let emotions get into my decisions.

AEO was an interesting stock today. It was up over 9%, making it a top 10 gainer on the NYSE. I am not really sure why they went up so much today. I clearly think they're undervalued, but not sure what was catalyst for top ten mover today. Volume was about 70% higher than "normal".

I did add MSTR today to my portfolio. I have had some of my MFI $ in cash and am getting back to being 100% invested. MSTR is a 2nd time stock for me. It was one of the first stocks I ever bought in MFI in Feb 2006. I made 36% on them, buying at $95 and selling at $129. The good news? I bought them this time at $69.55, seems like a "must be nuts" price. No they have not split in the 7 months since I sold them.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I think the AEO CEO has bought $20 million in AEO stock over the past several months and this recently became public info.

Marsh_Gerda said...

I checked the SEC filings and today it became public that the chairman of the board bought a ton of shares. Thanks for the heads-up.

Unknown said...

I have a ton of respect for Ken Fisher and read his Forbes column regularly. Here's a link to his Forbes articles.

http://search.forbes.com/search/colArchiveSearch?author=Fisher

An interesting thing I have noticed: he hasn't written a column in over two months, ever since the markets began acting crazy. Perhaps he is perplexed as the rest of us? Or maybe he just took a long vacation.