Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of April 09, 2019

Article Excerpt

Before you let trading rules or market indicators influence your investment decisions, it’s a good idea to check them for signs of the Gambler’s Fallacy. This is a logical error that gamblers make, but it also turns up in a lot of investor thinking. The simplest way to explain it is to show how it works in a coin toss. Often, people intuitively feel that after heads comes up in a series of coin tosses, the next toss is increasingly likely to come up tails. Without getting technical about it, they are mistaken. That’s because each coin toss is an independent event. It has a random outcome with 50-50 odds of heads or tails. People understand that 50-50 odds means that heads and tails must come up in equal numbers over long periods. But some fail to appreciate that the next coin toss is always an independent, random event. Random events vary unpredictably, but they commonly occur in unpredictable bunches. A 100-toss…