Mind Over Money's Podcast

  Welcome back to Mind Over Money. I’m Kevin Cook, your field-guide and story-teller for the fascinating arena of Behavioral Economics. Please pick a time stamped topic below:   (0:30) - Disruptive Technology and New Shopping Behavior (2:10) - Google, Facebook and Alibaba Making Waves in the News (8:30) - Facebook Ads: Creating a Revolution For Small Business (10:00) - The E.T. Economy: It's All About Consumer Experience (15:20) - The Gig Economy: Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, Upwork (19:00) - Mobile Shopping: SSF Method and 8 Big Predictions for Facebook Marketing (25:00) - How Facebook Sells $30 Billion in Advertising (28:30) - Episode Roundup: Podcast@Zacks.com  

Could automation and AI wipe out a billion jobs in the next decade and create an inequality chasm? Please pick a time stamped topic below: (0:40) - Automation Puts a Billion Jobs in Danger (2:00) - Big Economic Disruption: Big Data, AI and Robotics (3:40) - Is the Industrial Revolution Coming To An End For China and India? (6:10) - Where are the Investment Opportunities? (10:30) - IBM and Nvidia (13:00) - Elon Musk: Neuralink (16:30) - Biological Evolution: 3 Must Read Books (19:45) - Yuval Noah Harari - Homo Deus (27:15) - Episode Roundup: Podcast@Zacks.com

While Dan Ariely’s first book offered a slightly depressing view of human behavior, Payoff may change your life for the better. Please pick a time stamped topic below: (0:20) - Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational (4:10) - Do first impressions get imprinted on us? (6:30) - Arbitrary Coherence: Why do we accept anchors? (12:00) - Are price tags anchors? (14:30) - Dan Ariely: Payoff (16:40) - What gets scheduled, gets done.

Welcome back to the Mind Over Money podcast. I’m Kevin Cook, your field guide and storyteller for the fascinating arena of behavioral economics. I’m excited about today’s topics because we are going to talk about how our brains use stories to make decisions. In fact, after I tell you a few stories about brains and stories, you’ll start to wonder which came first – brains or stories! Please pick a time stamped topic below:   (0:30) - How Storytelling helps us make decisions: Peter Guber Article (4:15) - How do our perceptions effect our decision making (7:15) - Insights from neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga (15:00) - Experiments done by neuroeconomist, Paul Zak (21:50) - Molly Crockett: "Beware neruo-bunk"

Welcome back to Mind Over Money. I’m Kevin Cook, your field guide and story teller for the fascinating arena of Behavioral Economics.   Today my guest is a trading coach who once worked in the field of “threat assessment” where he dealt with bank robbers, hostage negotiations and bomb threats.   Now psychologist Andrew Menaker focuses on a pragmatic model to help traders create self-awareness, positive behavior change, and ultimately success in their chosen vocation.   And I'm really excited to talk to him because he gives powerful depth and breadth to areas of trading psychology that I have long known were extremely important but never thought could be formulated into repeatable cognitive strategies that could help so many different types of traders.   Before we meet Dr. Menaker, I want to share a short blog he posted on LinkedIn back in October. This excerpt will set up our conversation well...   Trading Psychology That Works!   You know those lists of personality traits or characteristics of ‘good traders’

The Evolution of Risk-Taking   Trading is one of the hardest day jobs in the world – what drives those who succeed at it?   Welcome back to Mind Over Money, I’m Kevin Cook, your field guide and story teller for the fascinating arena of behavioral economics.   Today my guest is a PhD candidate from the University of Greenwich in London who is studying the risk-taking behavior of traders from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.   Belinda Vigors wants to know if successful traders are doing anything different when making decisions under uncertainty and stress than us mere mortals who wrestle with our cognitive biases and unknown depths of neurochemistry and neuro-circuitry that drive our emotional habits.   Before we meet Belinda, I want to give you some background for our discussion that is actually causing a rift in the field of behavioral economics, at least for those of us who apply it to markets and trading.   I have been a long-time fan of Daniel Kahneman -- who is the only psychologist ever to wi

How one of the smartest minds on Wall Street was blinded by belief and abandoned due diligence   VRX, CP, MTN, HLF, CMG   Welcome to Mind Over Money. I’m Kevin Cook, your field guide and story teller for the fascinating arena of Behavioral Economics.   I’m back after a 3-week bout with bronchitis. I’ve got a funny story about what I learned at the doctor that ties into a great neuroscience topic: how we acquire new skills. But first, let me preview our main topic for the show today...   As 2016 winds down, I want to re-cap one of the biggest stock market implosions of the past 18 months and the big name investor who last week began some tax loss selling after a 95% drop in the shares.   The stock is that of Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX). And the big investor is Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management. His funds have lost billions of dollars because the Valeant implosion. And the story I am going to tell you will definitely interest you if you are at all curious about how smart people make really dis

While Renaissance Technologies makes most other hedge funds look foolish, even the independent trader can copy their discipline   NFLX, PANW   Long-time followers of mine in this bull market know that every quarter I go over the holdings of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies because they were one of the early quant houses that made algo trading so successful and popular.   The founder, Jim Simons, was a mathematics professor in the 1970s who never thought about the markets much. He sort of stumbled into testing some theories on stocks, and the rest is history as he was pulled headlong into the markets and created a powerhouse with over $50 billion AUM (assets under management).   And Simons made a point of not hiring MBAs, traders, or anyone with a background in finance. He only wanted physicists, engineers and other quantitative problem-solvers to come work for him and mine the data of markets to find unique correlations, patterns and new edges.   What kind of data patterns and correlations are they after?

In today's Mind Over Money podcast, I took a closer look at decision-making. Specifically, I wanted to explore what often gets in the way of good decision-making, especially when the financial landscape is shifting like it is now.   And that means we have to focus on the cognitive biases, those mental short-cuts, filters, and processes that help us make decisions faster.   Because those same short-cuts just as often short-change us from the best outcomes in everything from stock-picking -- and its twin challenges of risk and profit management -- to car shopping and job hunting.   Remember that this podcast wants to come at our “brains on risk” from 3 distinct angles:   Angle #1 is behavioral finance. This is the field of cognitive biases and heuristics that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky broke big ground for in the late 1960s and 1970s. I call this way of knowing about our decision-making the OUTSIDE-IN approach because the behavioral researchers and social scientists are conducting problem-based experiment

Learning how to use the 90% of brain insights underneath conscious awareness   When Denise Shull earned her Masters in Neuroscience from the University of Chicago in 1995, she didn’t imagine she would become a go-to consultant and coach for world-class traders ten years later, much less for Olympic athletes this year.   But that’s what has transpired in her career as someone deeply interested in human emotion and decision-making. In this episode of Mind Over Money, I invited Denise to discuss her work and her recent joint venture with Bloomberg Tradebook to train trader brains.   Based on her many years of research on how traders make decisions and deal with emotional responses – including several years as a professional trader herself – Shull and her team at The ReThink Group developed trader training software that she’s inviting anyone to try at https://traderbrainexercise.com/   Trader’s “Gut” in a World at “Max Algo”   Shull’s insights about how we can tap into subconscious pattern recognition and cognit

Today marks the kick-off edition of Mind Over Money, the only podcast that exposes the psychology of investing. I’m Kevin Cook, your field-guide and story-teller for the fascinating arena known as behavioral economics, which includes the sub-field behavioral finance and also draws in the related research from neuroscience, where brain imaging “sheds light,” if you’ll pardon the pun, on how we make decisions about money, uncertainty, and risk.   Jason Zweig described these merging fields in his 2007 book Your Money & Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich.   Zweig, as you may know, wrote for Money magazine for years and was the editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. He now writes for the WSJ. So he wasn’t just a journalist describing an investing fad. He’s schooled in classical investing methods and knew he was on to something of enduring importance when he either coined, or at least put on the map, the term “neuroeconomics.”   He ope