The bias catalogue
In this chapter: Loss aversion, anchoring, recency, herding, overconfidence · Confirmation, hindsight, availability
Common biases: Loss aversion (losses feel 2× as painful as equivalent gains feel pleasant — Tversky & Kahneman). Anchoring (fixating on a number — buy price, last peak). Recency (overweighting recent events). Herding (doing what others do). Overconfidence (especially after winning streaks). Confirmation (seeking only confirming evidence). Hindsight (believing past events were predictable). Availability (judging probability by ease of recall).
Loss aversion → reluctance to sell losers (mental accounting refuses to crystallise loss). Anchoring → "I'll sell when it gets back to ₹500" mentality even when the thesis has changed. Recency → after 2020 crash, retail panic-sold; after 2021 rally, retail piled in at peak. Herding → social media and WhatsApp groups amplify herd behaviour, often catastrophically. Overconfidence → traders who win 5 trades feel invincible by trade 6. Confirmation → reading only bullish news on owned stocks. Hindsight → "I knew this was a bubble" after the fact. Availability → fearing plane crashes more than car crashes despite far higher car-crash deaths.
A nuanced insight: biases are not errors — they're evolutionary adaptations that misfire in novel domains. Loss aversion makes sense if losing the morning's berries means starvation; less so when stock prices fluctuate temporarily. Anchoring makes sense for spotting predictable pattern-shifts; less so for arbitrary price levels. The cure isn't suppression (impossible) but environment-design: structure your decisions so System 1 can't hijack the process. Pre-commitment, automation, rules-based trading.