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Thursday, March 15, 2012

Why older people should make better value investors

During the Behavioural Finance elective taught by Prof Joshy Jacob at IIM Ahmedabad, some points were quite interesting, and after connecting the dots, I thought of this post. We see very few old traders, but we see umpteen value investors over 50(Buffet/Munger as the most famous examples). Like vintage wines, they seem to grow better with age. Some possible reasons for this are below(for this post I mean value investors as those who trade based on perceptions of value, and not on technical indicators solely!).
  1. Knowledge-As we age, the accumulated knowledge and wisdom is expected to grow, helping spot more connections, and more importantly, realizing that the 'new thing on the block' is just a revamped version of the past
  2. Self Discipline-This does grow with age, and is important for decisions like SIPs, cutting loss etc
  3. First hand experience of market cycles-This helps investors to avoid getting caught up in booms/panics because they have seen it all before, and hopefully should be able to remember the past.
  4. Lower testosterone:- As the testosterone levels go down, the tendency for noise trading would go down, and patience is more. That would help for value investors. 
Would appreciate reader comments on this one

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