Humans’ reactions are contaminated with their cognitive biases, greed, fear, and survival instinct. However, capital market success requires precisely the opposite behavior of what your intuition is suggesting.

All common investments have a great feature; the maximum amount you can lose is your capital.

No investor can have a successful career without a sufficient understanding of fear and keeping it in check.

The greatest fear of a professional investor, who manages money for a living, is capital withdrawals at the wrong time.

Individual investors have significant advantages over professional money managers. Retail investors, like you and I, have nobody to report. We have no benchmark to beat and have no fear of capital flight. There are no quarter and year ends, and performance is not linked to calendars.

Investors need to keep their emotions in check for a successful investment career. It is the most important requirement. It’s even more critical than having access to capital and markets.

Traders and investors are humans, full of emotions, behavior biases, and good and bad past experiences. We don’t have much control over psychological shortcomings, and we routinely make decisions contaminated with our emotions and biases.

Economic conditions may differ from period to period, but human psychology is embedded among us and will not change.

Market participants are humans, and so are their behaviors.