Resources and Stories for Real People

Behavioral finance scholars often express skepticism about their own and others’ ability to avoid cognitive errors. Indeed, Daniel Kahneman, who, along with Amos Tversky, identified most of the cognitive errors we know, said that despite his decades of studying decision-making, he still committed the same cognitive errors as everyone else.

As markets closed in the U.S. on the last trading day of February 2026, year-to-date stock market returns ranged from middling — the S&P 500® Index was up ~0.7% — to very strong — the MSCI EM IMI was up nearly 14.5% in U.S. dollar terms. Over the weekend, geopolitical

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