RE: What are we waiting for?14 May 2020 10:32
The Disposition Effect is getting to me.
The disposition effect is an anomaly discovered in behavioral finance. It relates to the tendency of investors to sell assets that have increased in value, while keeping assets that have dropped in value.
Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman identified and named the effect in their 1985 paper, which found that people dislike losing significantly more than they enjoy winning. The disposition effect has been described as "one of the most robust facts about the trading of individual investors" because investors will hold stocks that have lost value yet sell stocks that have gained value."
The disposition effect can be minimized by means of a mental approach called "hedonic framing". For example, individuals can try to force themselves to think of a single large gain as a number of smaller gains, to think of a number of smaller losses as a single large loss, to think of the combination of a major gain and a minor loss as a net minor gain, and, in the case of a combined major loss and minor gain, to think of the two separately. In a similar manner, investors show a reversed disposition effect when they are framed to think of their investment as progress towards a specific investment goal rather than a generic investment.
I'm thinking I am sitting on the largest gain of my life and I don't want to lose it in a stock market crash.