Investor preferences
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
If investor biases should be managed, investor preferences should be respected and re?ected in investment strategy, in so far as it is both feasible and sensible (after discussing the various issues with an investÂment adviser).
There are two particular areas of investor preference that have been highlighted by behavioural ?nance. The ? rst (perhaps not surprisingly) is loss aversion, which in behavioural ?nance ?lls the role of risk aversion in traditional ?nance. The second is mental accounting, which re?ects the way in which investors assign sums of money to different actual or notional accounts for different purposes with varying degrees of risk tolerance depending upon the importance of achieving the particular objective. For example, an individual’s summer vacation money will be in a different mental account (and probably a different actual account) from pension savings.