Investor Education
The 6 Biggest Mistakes Ordinary Investors Make
The 6 Biggest Mistakes Ordinary Investors Make
In many areas of life, we are often our own worst enemies. The realm of personal finance is no different.
What’s the biggest threat to achieving financial independence?
Unfortunately, it’s your own brain.
You can invest in all the right things, minimize fees and taxes, and even diversify your holdings. But if you fail to master your own psychology, it’s still possible to fall victim to financial self-sabotage.
The Brain’s Design
Today’s infographic is from Tony Robbins, and it uses data and talking points from his #1 Best Selling book Unshakeable: Your Financial Freedom Playbook, which is now available on paperback.
The graphic is based on a chapter in the book that reveals the key psychological limitations of the human brain. It turns out that these fallible survival instincts have been hardwired into our brains over millions of years, and they become very troublesome when we try to make rational financial decisions.
To overcome these instincts, investors need to adopt simple systems, rules, and procedures that can ensure the decisions around money we make are in our best long-term interest.
What I’ve found again and again is that 80% of success is psychology and 20% is mechanics.
– Tony Robbins
Six Psychological Pitfalls to Avoid
Remember these six pitfalls – and how to counteract them – and you’ll be able to avoid the biggest mistakes often made by investors.
Mistake #1:
Seeking confirmation of your own beliefs
Your brain is wired to seek and believe information that validates your existing beliefs. Our minds love “proof” of how smart and right we are.
Even worse, this is magnified by the online echo chambers of the modern world.
- News media (MSNBC, Fox News, etc.) tend to favor one point of view
- Google and Facebook filter our search results
- Unsubstantiated rumors can run unchecked, as long as they reinforce existing points of view
This can be exceptionally detrimental in investing.
Convincing yourself that a particular stock or strategy is correct, without taking into account contradicting evidence, can be the nail in the coffin of financial freedom.
The Solution: Welcome opinions that contradict your own
The best investors know they are vulnerable to confirmation bias, and actively ask questions and seek qualified opinions that disagree with their own.
Ray Dalio, for example, seeks the smartest detractor of his idea, and then tries to find out their full reasoning behind their contrary opinion.
The power of thoughtful disagreement is a great thing.
– Ray Dalio
Mistake #2:
Conflating recent events with ongoing trends
One of the most common – and dangerous – investing mistakes is to believe that the current trend of the day will continue.
In psychology speak, this is known as recency bias, or putting more weight on recent events when evaluating the odds of something happening in the future
For example, an investor might think that because a stock has performed well recently, that it will also do well in the future. Therefore, she buys more – effectively buying at a high point in the stock.
The Solution: Re-balance
Our memories are short, so what can we do?
The best way to avoid this impulsive and faulty decision making is to commit to portfolio allocations (i.e. 60% stocks, 40% bonds) in advance, and then re-balancing on a regular basis.
This effectively ensures you are buying low, and selling high. When stocks to well, you sell some of them to buy other assets in the underweighted part of your portfolio, and vice versa.
Mistake #3:
Overconfidence
Very successful and driven people often assume they will be just as good at investing as they are at other aspects of their life. However, this overconfidence is a common cognitive bias: we constantly overestimate our abilities, our knowledge, and our future prospects.
The Solution: Get Real, and Get Honest
By admitting you have no special advantage, you give yourself an enormous advantage – and you’ll beat the overconfident investors that delude themselves in believing they can outperform.
If you can’t predict the future, the most important thing is to admit it. If it’s true that you can’t make forecasts and yet you try anyway, then that’s really suicide.
– Howard Marks
Mistake #4:
Swinging for the Fences
It’s tempting to go for the big wins in your quest to build financial wealth. But swinging for the fences also means more strikeouts – many which can be difficult to recover from.
The Solution: Think Long Term
The best way to win the game of investing is to achieve sustainable long-term returns that compound over time. Don’t get distracted by the short-term noise on Wall Street, and re-orient your approach to build wealth over the long term.
The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.
– Warren Buffett
Mistake #5:
Staying Home
This psychological bias is known as “home bias”, and it is the tendency for people to invest disproportionately in markets that are familiar to them. For example, investing in:
- Your employer’s stock
- Your own industry
- Your own country’s stock market
- Only one asset class
Home bias can leave you overweighted in “what you know”, which can wreak havoc on your portfolio in some circumstances.
The Solution: Diversify
Diversify broadly, in different asset classes and in different countries. From 2000 to 2009, the S&P 500 only returned 1.4% per year, but foreign markets picked up the slack:
- International stocks: 3.9% per year
- Emerging markets: 16.2% per year
A well-diversified portfolio would have done well, no matter what.
Mistake #6:
Negativity Bias
Our brains are wired to bombard us with memories of negative experiences.
In fact, one part of our brain – the amygdala – is a biological alarm system that floods the body with fear signals when we are losing money.
The problem with this? When markets plunge, fear takes over and it’s easy to act irrationally. Some people panic, selling their entire portfolios to go into cash.
The Solution: Prepare
The best way to avoid negativity bias is to:
- Keep record of why you invested in certain securities in the first place
- Maintain the right asset allocation that will help you through volatility
- Partner with the right financial advisor to offer advice
- Focus on the long term, and avoid short-term market distractions
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
– Benjamin Franklin
Conclusion
These simple rules and procedures will make it easier for you to invest for the long term.
They’ll help you:
- Trade less
- Lower investment fees and transaction costs
- Be more open to views that differ from your own
- Reduce risk by diversifying globally
- Control the fears that could otherwise derail you
Will you be perfect? No.
But will you do better? You bet!
And the difference this makes over a lifetime can be substantial.
Technology
Thematic Investing: 3 Key Trends in Cybersecurity
Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated. Here’s what investors need to know about the future of cybersecurity.


Thematic Investing: 3 Key Trends in Cybersecurity
In 2020, the global cost of cybercrime was estimated to be around $945 billion, according to McAfee.
It’s likely even higher today, as multiple sources have recorded an increase in the frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks during the pandemic.
In this infographic from Global X ETFs, we highlight three major trends that are shaping the future of the cybersecurity industry that investors need to know.
Trend 1: Increasing Costs
Research from IBM determined that the average data breach cost businesses $4.2 million in 2021, up from $3.6 million in 2017. The following table breaks this figure into four components:
Cost Component | Value ($) |
---|---|
Cost of lost business | $1.6M |
Detection and escalation | $1.2M |
Post breach response | $1.1M |
Notification | $0.3M |
Total | $4.2M |
The greatest cost of a data breach is lost business, which results from system downtimes, reputational losses, and lost customers. Second is detection and escalation, including investigative activities, audit services, and communications to stakeholders.
Post breach response includes costs such as legal expenditures, issuing new accounts or credit cards (in the case of financial institutions), and other monitoring services. Lastly, notification refers to the cost of notifying regulators, stakeholders, and other third parties.
To stay ahead of these rising costs, businesses are placing more emphasis on cybersecurity. For example, Microsoft announced in September 2021 that it would quadruple its cybersecurity investments to $20 billion over the next five years.
Trend 2: Remote Work Opens New Vulnerabilities
According to IBM, companies that rely more on remote work experience greater losses from data breaches. For companies where 81 to 100% of employees were remote, the average cost of a data breach was $5.5 million (2021). This dropped to $3.7 million for companies that had under 10% of employees working from home.
A major reason for this gap is that work-from-home setups are typically less secure. Phishing attacks surged in 2021, taking advantage of the fact that many employees access corporate systems through their personal devices.
Type of Attack | Number of attacks in 2020 | Number of attacks in 2021 | Growth (%) |
---|---|---|---|
Spam phishing | 1.5M | 10.1M | +573% |
Credential phishing | 5.5M | 6.2M | +13% |
As detected by Trend Micro’s Cloud App Security.
Spam phishing refers to “fake” emails that trick users by impersonating company management. They can include malicious links that download ransomware onto the users device. Credential phishing is similar in concept, though the goal is to steal a person’s account credentials.
A tactic you may have seen before is the Amazon scam, where senders impersonate Amazon and convince users to update their payment methods. This strategy could also be used to gain access to a company’s internal systems.
Trend 3: AI Can Reduce the Cost of a Data Breach
AI-based cybersecurity can detect and respond to cyberattacks without any human intervention. When fully deployed, IBM measured a 20% reduction in the time it takes to identify and contain a breach. It also resulted in cost savings upwards of 60%.
A prominent user of AI-based cybersecurity is Google, which uses machine learning to detect phishing attacks within Gmail.
Machine learning helps Gmail block spam and phishing messages from showing up in your inbox with over 99.9% accuracy. This is huge, given that 50-70% of messages that Gmail receives are spam.
– Andy Wen, Google
As cybercrime escalates, Acumen Research and Consulting believes the market for AI-based security solutions will reach $134 billion by 2030, up from $15 billion in 2021.
Introducing the Global X Cybersecurity ETF
The Global X Cybersecurity ETF (Ticker: BUG) seeks to provide investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of the Indxx Cybersecurity Index. See below for industry and country-level breakdowns, as of June 2022.
Sector (By security type) | Weight |
---|---|
Cloud | 28.0% |
Network | 25.1% |
Identity | 17.7% |
Internet | 15.0% |
Endpoint | 12.8% |
Country | Weight |
---|---|
🇺🇸 U.S. | 71.6% |
🇮🇱 Israel | 13.2% |
🇬🇧 UK | 8.2% |
🇯🇵 Japan | 5.5% |
🇰🇷 South Korea | 0.9% |
🇨🇦 Canada | 0.6% |
Totals may not equal 100% due to rounding.
Investors can use this passively managed solution to gain exposure to the rising adoption of cybersecurity technologies.

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