Resources and Stories for Real People

Financial decision-making is often modeled as stable over time: Investors have preferences, update beliefs, and choose portfolios in predictable ways. But research at the intersection of neuroscience and finance paints a more complex — and more realistic — picture. How people process financial information depends not only on markets and

It was another remarkable year for the U.S. stock market in 2025. The S&P 500® Index rose nearly 18% with 46 new all-time highs during the year! While undoubtedly a good outcome, a single return figure fails to capture the full experience of investors. Figure 1 helps fill in the

Last year, I visited New York and found myself walking through Greenwich Village. I couldn’t help but notice how the neighborhood looked qualitatively different from the 1940s photographs I’d seen and from my memories of it when I lived there more than 10 years ago. Sure, there were still some

What do gold, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), paintings, furs and diamonds all have in common? Things you’ve seen on a “Real Housewives” episode, you say? Maybe so, but here’s what we had in mind. Each is an asset that produces no cash flow. They’re like buying a goose that lays

Declining interest rates are generally a good thing for bond returns. All else being equal, as bond yields go down, their prices go up. Many people are familiar with this relationship, but what about stocks? Can declining interest rates inform our expectations for future stock returns? This question has come

“Don’t gamble,” Will Rogers said. “Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.”1 The Psychology Behind Hindsight Bias The psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, who introduced us to hindsight shortcuts and errors, wrote,