There’s no question that we experience emotional pain and anxiety when our portfolios are losing money due to market downturns. Behavioral scientists tell us that we feel losses twice as keenly as positive returns.

But that doesn’t tell us what we really want to know, which is: other than selling at the wrong time and locking in losses, how do we make these downturns less painful?

Economist Richard Thaler conducted a stock market experiment that offers

Investment companies, brokers, and even financial advisors have pioneered clever ways to make themselves look far better than they actually are. Recently, in an article in the Journal of Financial Planning, a financial advisor laid out some of the most deceptive practices that he’s run across–practices which, to the untrained eye, can make an ordinary investment company or advice-giver look like a genius.

Such as? Suppose an advisor says that he has the rare ability to hand-select terrific investment opportunities