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

When a former White House Budget director who famously never balanced the federal budget suddenly claims to have special powers to forecast a major economic crisis, it’s hard to understand why anybody pays attention. But recently David Stockman, who served as Ronald Reagan’s budget chief back in the 1980s, has gotten a lot of publicity for his fiery Easter Sunday article in the New York Times, telling us that America’s future is bleak and everybody should get out of

One of the more interesting myths in the investment world is that large financial institutions, with their access to mountains of data pored over by teams of staff economists, can determine where the markets are going and profit accordingly. Gullible investors believe this even though, every year, we can go back to the confident predictions of brokerage firm leaders and leading hedge fund managers and see a hard-to-explain gulf between expectation and reality.

This past 12 months, the broad U.S.

If you’re feeling a bit gloomy about the economy and the markets, you have a lot
of company these days. Despite U.S. stocks getting off to a positive start in the scary month of September, the news seems to be all about the possibility of a double-dip recession. One economist, David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff, has suggested that the recession never ended despite positive economic growth in the first half of 2010. Meanwhile, the put-call ratio, which compares the number of