In 1973, psychologist Paul Slovic ran an experiment on eight professional horse race handicappers that has become a fixture in behavioural finance research. The design was simple. The implications for anyone who equates more research with better decisions are not. The Setup Slovic worked with men who handicapped races for a living, not casual bettors….
Four weeks. That is all it took for the world’s best-performing stock market to become a bear market. In June 2026, the KOSPI crossed 9,300 for the first time in its history. South Korea had leapfrogged both India and the UK to become the sixth largest stock market on the planet. Then, within a month,…
There is a comforting assumption buried in most retail investing narratives: that the market is, at bottom, an intelligence test. Beat it with enough analysis, enough processing power, enough raw cognitive horsepower, and returns should follow. Three case studies, separated by three centuries, dismantle that assumption completely. Two involve certified geniuses. One involves the most…
The Ayyavole 500, also known as the Five Hundred Lords of Ayyavole, Ainnurruvar (Tamil), or Nanadesi, was a confederation of merchant guilds active in South India and across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal trade arc from roughly the 8th/9th century CE through the 15th century, a run of over 600 years. It was…
There is a particular kind of frustration every serious investor eventually meets. The price-to-earnings ratio looks reasonable, the balance sheet is clean, the discounted cash flow model says the stock is undervalued, and the market still refuses to cooperate. Sentiment turns sour for no visible reason, volatility spikes without a headline to explain it, and the usual…
The Guru Was Also Once a Scared Investor Every financial guru you follow today was, at some point, a frightened human being watching their portfolio (or their client’s) get destroyed. That moment never fully leaves them. It becomes the lens through which they see every market that follows, and it explains far more about their…
A wave of the world’s best-selling drugs is about to lose patent protection. When that happens, cheaper copies (generics and biosimilars) flood in, prices crash, and someone has to manufacture all those cheaper copies. That “someone” is very often an Indian company. This is called a patent cliff. It has happened before, but the one…
People forget how quickly the world can change. In February 1965, Charles de Gaulle stood before the world’s press at the Élysée Palace and said the one thing no Western leader was supposed to say out loud: the world should return to gold. Not the dollar. Not promises. Gold, because it “has no nationality” and…
Somewhere, a 64-year-old is doing math. Corpus built. Withdraw 4% a year. Bump it for inflation. Relax. It feels like science. It is actually folklore, and it was written in a country that is not yours. Where the number came from In 1994, an American financial planner named William Bengen tested a simple idea against…
“The greatest enemy of a good investment plan is often the investor himself.” That observation has become a staple of financial advisory circles, and much of the evidence behind it comes from one of the world’s most respected investor behaviour studies. For over three decades, DALBAR Inc., a Boston-based financial services market research firm, has…
