News & Updates

This is the third post in a series giving our response to the FCA’s Call for Input on how to apply behavioural finance to help people make engaged investment choices more comfortably and confidently, and what role regulations can play in helping that to happen.

This is part two of our response to the FCA’s Call for Input on how to apply behavioural finance to help people make engaged investment choices more comfortably and confidently, and what role regulations can play in helping that to happen.

This is the introduction to a series of posts on our response to the FCA’s Call for Input on how to apply behavioural finance to help people make engaged investment choices more comfortably and confidently, and what role regulations can play in helping that to happen.

Do not tell people how to behave. Predict how they're going to behave and plan appropriate preventative action. Use a solution that is psychological, preventative, personal, perpetual, and planned for.

People buy stories, not investments. Without a supporting framework of fairytale-esque familiarity, diversification leads to discomfort. If diversification causes distress, it ceases to be such an obviously smart idea.

Accounting for an investor's time horizon needs a rethink now that investments are no longer closely tied to singular investment objectives.

Form must follow function. Capturing clicks is no use without first capturing valuable, usable, client insights.

Personal finance is behavioural finance.Blending behavioural psychology with quantitative-finance theory employs the best of both human and algorithmic worlds.

Most attempts to measure risk tolerance fail in at least one crucial way, be it confusing the measurement, confusing the audience, or thinking guesswork is a good enough replacement for rigorous psychometric science.

Investment plans that ignore, or pay only the whisper of lip service, to investor behaviours, are ultimately futile. Ultimately, the true job of a financial adviser is not to give clients a theoretically 'optimal' solution, but to give them the best solution they could realise in practice.