Dopamine and Pattern Seeking and Your Investments

Insights from Jason Zweig's Your Money and Your Brain:

Why do we continue to believe that we can outperform the market when research continually demonstrates that we cant?

The answer partly lies in pattern seeking behavior and dopamine.

Pattern recognition: humans have survived because the brain recognized simple patterns in nature. Unfortunately, the investment world is governed by acts of randomness, yet we want to believe we can see patterns and predict the future. This pattern seeking behavior is unconscious and uncontrollable and we humans will leap to conclusions. Such as, when we observe two or three years in a row of superior mutual fund performance, we tend to believe that a pattern is emerging and expect a fourth year of good performance.Study's show past mutual fund success is not the best predictor of future success, yet we cant help ourselves, we choose past winners.

Then there is dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical that sends energy throughout the brain and turns motivation into actions. Dopamine is so powerful that a rat will starve to death rather than turn away from dopamine. Lay an MRI scan of a cocaine addict about to get a fix next to that of a person who thinks he is about to win money and they are virtually the same. We also know this about dopamine and rewards: dopamine is strongest when a reward is unexpected. That getting what you expected does not produce dopamine, and if the expected reward does not show up then the dopamine dries up. We also know that if the reward is big enough, dopamine seems to have a memory. This last point is huge. Investors who have received a large reward will experience a dopamine release if a pattern similar to the winning pattern is observed. This may result in the investor taking actions that are not sound.

What can you do to help protect you from yourself:

1. Stop predicting the market.

2. Ask for evidence.

3. Face up to base rates - long term outcome using a large sample.

4. Realize that correlation is not causation - there is so much information available that marketers can prove anything. ask yourself how the results would be if the dates were different or if the assumptions were slightly different.

5. Take a break - give your brain time to re-group

6.Don't obsess -the more an investor watches his investment the likelier he is to trade and thus decrease his long term return.