Psychology and Investing: Mental Accounting and Framing Effect

Most of us separate our money into buckets - this money is for the kids' college education, this money is for our retirement, this money is for the house.   Heaven forbid that we spend the house money on a vacation.

Investors derive some benefits from this behaviour.

• Earmarking money for retirement may prevent us from spending it frivolously.

Mental accounting becomes a problem, though, when we categorize our funds without looking at the big picture.

• While we might diligently place any extra money left over from our regular income into savings, we often view tax refunds as "found money" to be spent more frivolously.  
• Since tax refunds are in fact our earned income, they should not be considered this way.
• For gamblers, this effect can be referred to as "house money."

We are much more likely to take risks with house money than with our own.

• There is a perception that the money isn't really ours and wasn't earned, so it is okay to take more risks with it.  
• This is risk we would be unlikely to take if we would spent time working for that money ourselves.

In investing, just remember that money is money, no matter whether the funds in a brokerage account are derived from hard-earned savings, an inheritance or realized capital gains.




Framing Effect

This is one other form of mental accounting.

The framing effect addresses how a reference point, oftentimes a meaningless benchmark, can affect decision.





Overcoming Mental Accounting.

The best way to avoid the negative aspects of mental accounting is to concentrate on the total return of your investments.

Take care not to think of your "budget buckets" so discretely that you fail to see how some seemingly small decisions can make a big impact.

The investment mistakes caused by framing

Behavioural finance: The investment mistakes caused by framing

In this post on behavioural investing, we'll look at the dramatic effects the concept of framing can have in an investment context.

Peoples' personality traits can hugely affect the way they react to the actual performance of their portfolio in the future. For example, consider a situation where two investors (Bob and Brian) have made the same investment. Over one year, the market average rises 10 per cent but the individual investment value increases by 6 per cent. 

Bob cares only about the investment return and frames this as a gain of 6 per cent. Brian is concerned with how the investment performs relative to the benchmark of the market average. The investment has lagged behind the market’s performance and Brian frames this as a loss of 4 per cent. Which investor is likely to be happier with the performance of their investment?

Because of the way that individuals feel losses more than gains, Bob is much more likely to be happy with the investment than Brian. Their differing reactions here will frame their future investment decisions. Another problem for investors is the strong tendency for individuals to frame their investments too narrowly – looking at performance over short time periods, even when their investment horizon is long term. People also struggle to consider their portfolio as a whole, focusing too narrowly on the performance of individual components.

The 70% rule

Consider the “70% rule” that advises people to plan on spending about 70 per cent of their current income during their retirement.

For most people, this rule of thumb is intuitively appealing, which could explain why it has become so popular among financial planners. Now let’s use slightly different lenses and reframe the 70 per cent rule as the 30 per cent rule. That is, rather than focusing on the 70 per cent of expenditures someone would sustain through retirement, let’s consider the 30 per cent of expenditures that should be eliminated. Most people find the 30 percent rule unpalatable, even though the 70 per cent and 30 per cent rules are mathematically identical. 

Investors hate losses

Individuals are extremely sensitive to the way in which decisions are presented or ‘framed’ – simply changing the wording or adding irrelevant background detail can dramatically change peoples' perceptions of the alternatives available to them, even where there is no reason for their underlying preferences to have changed. When individuals make investment decisions, emotion and reason work together, but they produce very different emotional results depending on whether the investment made or lost money. For example, according to Shefrin, people tend to feel losses much more strongly than the pleasure of making a comparable gain.

This emotional strain is magnified when the person assumes responsibility for the loss. This guilt feeling then produces an aversion to risk. But this level of guilt can be changed depending on how a financial decision is framed. For example, if an adventurous investor seeking attractive returns over the long-term made close to 100 per cent over two years and then lost 20 per cent in year three, the investor could justify the year three loss by saying that even though they suffered a hefty loss over a twelve month period, the fact remains that they had made an annual return over the three years of 21.6 per cent which would be classed by many as impressive performance.

Myopic thinking can lead to investment mistakes

Behavioral finance's answer to the equity premium puzzle revolves around the tendency for people to have "myopic loss aversion", a situation in which investors - overly preoccupied by the negative effects of losses in comparison to an equivalent amount of gains – take a very short-term view on an investment. What happens is that investors are paying too much attention to the short-term volatility of their portfolios.

While it's not uncommon for an average stock or fund to fluctuate a few percentage points in a very short period of time, a myopic (i.e. shortsighted) investor may not react too favourably to the downside changes. Therefore, it is believed that equities must yield a high-enough premium to compensate for the investor's considerable aversion to loss.

Over-monitoring performance

How frequently you monitor your portfolio’s performance can bias your perception of it. Suppose you were investing over a 5-year investment horizon in a high-risk equity portfolio. The table below presents how you would perceive the portfolio depending on the monitoring period. Over the appropriate 5-year time frame, equity performance has been positive 90 per cent of the time, and so risky investments do not lose money more than 10 per cent of the time. However, if you were to monitor the performance of the same portfolio on a month-by-month basis, you would observe a loss 38 per cent of the time!*

Once again, because of our inherent aversion to loss, monitoring your portfolio more frequently will cause you to observe more periods of loss, making it likely you'll feel more emotional stress and take on less risk than is appropriate for your long-term investment objectives.

Percentage of time seeing:	5 year monitoring period	1-monthmonitoring period
Gains	90%	62%
Losses	10%	38%

Observing short-term fluctuations in the value of an investment is likely to cause more discomfort for investors who are particularly sensitive to losses. This may prevent them from investing in such a portfolio and thus lose out on the higher potential returns that they would get by taking on appropriate levels of risk.

* Source: Kahneman and Riepe, 1998.

http://web.isaco.co.uk/blog/bid/147855/Behavioural-finance-The-investment-mistakes-caused-by-framing

The 10 Mistakes Investors Most Commonly Make

All investors make mistakes. Otherwise, we'd all be millionaires. The trick is figuring out what our investing mistakes are -- and then trying to avoid them.

Meir Statman, one of the nation's leading experts in behavioral finance (the study of why people do irrational things with their money), has written a new book on the topic. In What Investors Really Want, published in October by McGraw-Hill, Statman goes a long way toward helping investors understand that many of their mistakes are caused by their own deep-seated emotions rather than, say, a company's unexpectedly poor earnings. 

In an interview with DailyFinance, Statman, a professor of finance at Santa Clara University in California, shared his top 10 errors that trip up average investors:

1. Hindsight error. "One of the most pernicious mistakes," Statman says. Because you can see the past clearly, you think you have a similar ability to tell the future. Hindsight error is common at the moment, Statman says, because many people are convinced they saw the crash coming in 2007. In reality, they may have thought a crash was possible, but they also thought the market might continue to zoom upward. Now, investors are convinced they actually saw the problem in 2007 but just didn't act on it. So, they believe wrongly that they can act correctly today. They think they know to sell at the precise moment the market is high and buy when the market is low. Based on their hindsight of 2007, portfolio diversification doesn't protect you from losses. But market timing rarely works, Statman says.

2. Unrealistic optimism. This is loosely related to overconfidence. Psychological studies have shown that when you ask people if they think they have the ability to pick stocks that will have above-average returns, men tend to say yes more often than women. "It's not because men are so smart. It's because men are unrealistically optimistic about their abilities," Statman says. This quality is great for job interviews, where you need to stand out from a crowd, but lousy for investing. "When you are unreasonably optimistic in the stock market, you are just readying yourself for an accident," he says.

3. Extrapolation errors. People expect that trends that existed in the recent past will continue in the future. For example, the fact that gold has gone up for the last 10 years has led many to believe it will always go up. But a study of a longer period -- going back to 1971 when President Richard Nixon ended the gold standard -- shows that gold hit a high of $850 an ounce in 1980 but was selling for $345 as long as 10 years later.

4. Framing errors. Often, Statman says, investing is like a game of tennis. People tend to see themselves hitting a ball against a wall, which seems easy. But that's the wrong frame. Investing is really like playing against another player -- when the other player is Warren Buffett or Goldman Sachs. Investors make framing errors when they see a CEO on TV talking up his stock. If it sounds good and you buy that stock, that's a framing error. Instead, you should be asking yourself: "Who else is watching this program, and what do I know that is uniquely mine?" "The answer is nothing," Statman says.

5. Availability errors. This refers to what information is available in your memory. Investors are often lulled into this error by investment companies. When you see an advertisement for a fund, it's almost invariably for one that has a four- or five-star rating from Morningstar. That way, the one- and two-star funds, with lackluster results, aren't available in your memory. "You say to yourself that there's a 90% chance I will be a winner," Statman says. Instead, look at results of entire fund families -- including the losers, not just the winning funds for a particular period, he says.

6. Confirmation errors. Investors tend to look for information that confirms their hypothesis, but they disregard evidence that contradicts it. Gold bugs, for example, constantly remind us that gold is a good hedge against inflation and a declining dollar. But when confronted with the evidence that gold actually fell price for an entire decade, they dismiss that as a different era because Ronald Reagan changed the rules of the investing game, and that problem won't be repeated.

7. Illusion of control. This is a sense investors have that they can make the market go up or down. It's like gamblers blowing on their dice before rolling. "These investors think they're riding the tiger, when in fact they're holding the tiger by the tail," Statman says. If you think you have a trick that can get the market to go your way, you better think twice: This is the illusion of control. "When you realize the market is actually a wild beast that can devour you, you try to put it in a cage," he says. A much safer approach.

8. Anger. This is an emotion we all know: It leads to things like road rage. In investing, you try to get even with the market. You do such things as double down or even sell all your stocks impulsively. "If you feel angry, it's better to wait 10 days before buying or selling, or you'll regret it later on," Statman says,

9. Fear. The other side of exuberance. When you're afraid, everything looks like a threat, and when you're exuberant, everything looks like an opportunity. Lots of investors are still afraid because of the market crash two years ago. They're sitting on the sidelines in cash earning no return or investing in things like Treasury bills, which aren't much of a bargain. "Risk and return go together," Statman says. "So, if you think the market is risky today, then you should also think the market has a good potential for high returns."

10. Affinity of groups. Also known as herding. You hear from your pediatrician that he's buying gold, so you think you should, too. But what do these people really know? What is the analysis based on? Statman notes that some herds are worth joining and some aren't. Many investors follow Warren Buffett's investment decisions and buy similar stocks. Since Buffett is usually a winner, perhaps that's a herd worth joining. But buying Internet stocks in 1999 or houses in 2005 based on what everyone else was doing was a horrible mistake.

Statman makes no grand conclusions in his book, but he does point out repeatedly that the average investor can rarely beat the market. Therefore, he recommends small investors put their money in index funds that provide average, if not spectacular returns -- and not catastrophic losses

"But if you like the pizazz of investing," he says, you might take a shot on individual stocks. Just be careful. 


By Charles Wallace

Posted 6:00AM 12/05/10
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/12/05/10-mistakes-investors-make/

Different styles of framing choices causes different preferred outcomes.

Loss Aversion, Risk, & Framing

The next stop in the framing inquiry involves the unique relationship of risk taking to positive and negative framing. Since losses loom larger than gains, it appears that humans follow conservative strategies when presented with a positively-framed dilemma, and risky strategies when presented with negatively-framed ones. To illustrate, consider Kahneman & Tversky's 1984 study where they asked a representative sample of physicians the following question. Read and answer it before you continue.

Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows: If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor? 

Be sure to answer this question before you proceed.

Have you answered? OK.

Notice that the preceding dilemma is positively framed. It views the dilemma in terms of "lives saved." When the question was framed in this manner, 72% of physicians chose A, the safe-and-sure strategy, but only 28% chose program B, the risky strategy. An equivalent set of physicians considered the same dilemma, but with the question framed negatively:

Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows: If program C is adopted, 400 people will die. If program D is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die. Which of the two programs would you favor? 

You can see that the two questions examine an identical dilemma. Two hundred of 600 people saved is the same as 400 of 600 lost. However, when the question was framed negatively, and physicians were concentrating on losses rather than gains, they voted in a dramatically different fashion. When framed negatively, 22% of the physicians voted for the conservative strategy and 72% of them opted for the risky strategy!

As you can see, framing the choice positively vs. negatively caused an almost perfect reversal in the choices of highly-trained experts making a decision in their field of expertise--saving (or is that 'not losing'?) lives! Clearly, framing can powerfully influence the way a problem is perceived, which in turn can lead to the favoring of radically different solutions.

Let's consider the same "negative frame => risky behavior" phenomenon from a somewhat less theoretical and more practical perspective. Imagine that you are a medical practitioner, and you have just seen your third case of advanced breast cancer in a single week. "Why," you wonder to yourself, "aren't these women performing breast self-exams (BSEs) and finding these lumps before they become full-fledged, life-endangering metastatic cancers?" Your clinic hands a brochure on BSE to every woman that enters the door, BSE is regularly described in newspapers and on TV; information on this topic isn't exactly scarce! Why do your patients choose to die rather than comply? you wonder.

But consider the act of a BSE. Logically, it's safe--but psychologically, it's a risky procedure. If you perform BSE, you may feel a lump. So performing BSE is a risky behavior, because by looking, you may find something you don't want to find. Not performing a BSE is a logical health risk behavior, but is safer psychologically. By not looking, you won't find anything that may cause you to worry.

Researchers Meyerowitz and Chaiken explored this very question in a 1987 research project. They distributed one of two brochures on BSE to equivalent patients in equivalent clinics. The brochures were identical in terms of content, but one stressed the gains associated with performing a BSE, and the other focused on the losses associated with inaction. You can guess the result, can't you? The negatively-framed brochure lead to higher positive BSE-related attitudes and behaviors. Actually, the true strength of the negative frame emerged four months after patients received the brochures. Those who received negatively-framed brochures showed significantly greater intentions to perform BSE at the later date.

Why is it that negative information causes increased persuasion in these types of situations? Psychologists have long known of the existence of the "positivity bias," which states that humans overwhelmingly expect good things (as opposed to neutral or bad things) to occur. If perceivers construct a world in which primarily positive elements are expected, then negative information becomes perceptually salient as a jolting disconfirmation of those expectations (Kanouse & Hanson, 1972). We also know that people stop to examine disconfirmations to a much higher degree than confirmations. Negative information is often highly informative and thus may be assigned extra weight in the decision-making process (Fiske, 1980; Smith & Petty, 1996). Let me ask you: if you learned that your friend's auto mechanic performed an excellent valve job but botched his automatic transmission repair, would you take your car to that mechanic? No, because negative information overwhelms positive information. You expect a mechanic to be effective, period.

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This topic is considered in further detail for the benefit of my students, who must enter the URLs found on the syllabus to access the following pages (if you're not a student of mine, please don't ask! The answer will be "Sorry."):

• Positive & Negative Frames (They're both effective in the appropriate circumstances, but you need to know which is best to use when.)
• Why Experts Fail to Predict (One reason experts make stupid mistakes.)
• Framing by Position (The real reason for the cheap and expensive models in the product lineup.)
• Framing by Contrast (How contrast is used to make you do things you wouldn't otherwise do.)
• Framing by Attribution (One of the most seductive persuasion tactics around because it makes people feel good!)

Ref:

http://www.workingpsychology.com/lossaver.html

http://www.workingpsychology.com/mediafr.html
Media framing (How the media frames the news and shapes public opinion.)