Skip to main content

  • Home
  • About
  • Our Process
  • Wealth Management Services
  • Our Clients
    • We work for you
    • Account Protection Pledge
    • Weekly Market Commentary
    • Recommended Reading
    • Blog
    • Resources
    • News
  • Contact
  • Client Login

    You are here

  1. Home
  2. Blogs
  3. Market Volatility Can Stir Your Loss Aversion

Market Volatility Can Stir Your Loss Aversion

Submitted by Financial Investment Management | Conscience Bay Capital on April 4th, 2022

At the foundation of your financial well-being lies your behavior.

Here is a statement that is bound to cause you to raise your eyebrows: Your long-term financial success may depend less on the structure of your portfolio than on your ability to adapt your behavior to changing economic times. 

At the very foundation of your financial well-being lies your behavior. In fact, one can plausibly argue that the dominant determinants of long-term, real-life, investment returns are not market behavior, but investment behavior.  

Look at it this way: most of us would agree that, while meticulously constructed investment portfolios can probably weather almost any economic storm, none can withstand the fatal blow of an owner who panics and sells out. 

So prevalent is such panic that an entire field – behavioral finance – studies how and why investors like you might make irrational money moves.

Who Can You Turn to For Help?

An increasing number of financial professionals realize that their primary business isn’t just helping develop your financial plan or furnishing you with investment advice, but caring for and transforming your emotional well-being.

In many respects, financial professionals are the antidote to investors’ panic. In theory, all financial professionals will try everything to keep a client from turning a temporary decline into a permanent loss.

But the tendency to sell low and buy high will not stop anytime soon – and it’s in all of us.

Supporting your financial and emotional well-being often requires that both you and a financial professional learn from each other and work together over the long term. You both also must realize that antidotes to panic sometimes require more than one dose.

Curing Irrational Investing Behavior

When managing personal finances and investments, people frequently exhibit irrational behavior for different reasons. If you’re one of these folks, be fair to yourself: It doesn’t even take a spate of market zigzags like what we saw in January of 2022 to prod you into questionable decisions.

Everyone makes choices about money nearly every day – how to earn, spend, save, invest, and so on. Sometimes you pick wisely, sometimes harmfully. Some decisions, particularly those regarding when and where to invest, whipsaw from wise to harmful and back, depending on when you reached your conclusion and when you took the plunge.

Supposedly, if you can learn more about the cause and effect of your money decisions, and what around you contributes to them, you can improve your financial confidence. Pinpointing behaviors as either rational or irrational in the middle of the storm comes hard, though. The January 2022 market provided a convenient and timely case study to help explain why.

How Did You Feel About January’s Volatility?

That month, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index declined 5.3% and NASDAQ dropped 9.0%. If sensitive to market moves, maybe you are reading the declines and ready to sell – a flight that might be shown as irrational a few years from now.

If you wanted to sell after January’s declines, you likely have loss aversion – one of many often-irrational money behaviors. Psychologically, people perceive losses (or declines in value of an investment) as much as 2½ times more impactful than gains of a similar size. Watch your investment drop by $1,000 and you may feel twice as bad as you might feel good about a gain of $1,000.

Most people are loss averse and it’s clear why many sell when market prices decline. Is loss aversion irrational? Or sometimes, is it timely clairvoyance?

Remember the COVID - Decline?

Let’s go back to the start of the pandemic. Let’s say you eliminated your market exposure on the same exact day that the CDC confirmed its first case of COVID on January 20th. And then you jumped back into the market exactly two months later, on March 20th. 

Instead of being irrational, you would have appeared brilliant. Because although January 20th was not precisely the high (it was February 14th, but you were really close), March 20th was exactly the bottom. 

What-if situations such as these clearly show that sometimes irrational behavior produces good outcomes. But more often than not, well-trained (and often self-proclaimed) experts, applying rational processes to money management, wind up on the wrong side of the intended outcome, especially in the short term. This helps to make investing fascinating and, at times, maddening.

Because investment markets are complex and potentially both irrational and efficient, it's important to understand your tolerance for risk. Define what risk actually means in terms of your financial confidence, and your willpower to handle markets when fear and greed influence decisions.

What is Your Investment Strategy?

A written investment strategy can serve as a foundation for your long-term decisions. Your strategy – and your commitment – may also benefit from testing your strategy’s performance hypothetically in past crises.

Since we can’t predict outcomes that depend partially on luck, we plan according to probabilities. For example, rather than focus on the size of your expected returns, know the probability that your investment strategy can support your desired spending rate in retirement or make tuition payments, fund a wedding, cover healthcare costs, and so on. Your broader financial plan drives your investment strategy, not the other way around.

Ideally, when your goals link directly to your plan, you have a better foundation for dealing with investment uncertainty and Wall Street’s effect on your emotions and decisions.

 

Important Disclosures

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

Investing involves risks including possible loss of principal. No investment strategy or risk management technique can guarantee return or eliminate risk in all market environments.

S&P 500 Index: The Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 Index tracks the performance of 500 widely held, large-capitalization US stocks.

The NASDAQ-100 is composed of the 100 largest domestic and international non-financial securities listed on The Nasdaq Stock Market. 

The Index reflects companies across major industry groups including computer hardware and software, telecommunications, retail/wholesale trade, and biotechnology, but does not contain securities of financial companies.

 

All information is believed to be from reliable sources; however LPL Financial makes no representation as to its completeness or accuracy.

This article was prepared by FMeX.

LPL Tracking #1-05241880

Tags:
  • Behavioral Finance

Categories

  • 2024 (1)
  • 401K (3)
  • Behavioral Finance (2)
  • Bonds (1)
  • Business Owners (1)
  • Charitable Giving (2)
  • Christmas (1)
  • Cyber-security (1)
  • Estate Planning (4)
  • Financial Planning (9)
  • Financial Review (4)
  • Generational Wealth (1)
  • Healthcare (1)
  • Inflation (1)
  • Inheritance (1)
  • Investing (5)
  • Investment Management (1)
  • IRA's (1)
  • IRS (3)
  • Long-Term Care (1)
  • Market Activity (12)
  • Money Management (1)
  • Outlook (3)
  • Required Minimum Distributions (1)
  • Retirement Planning (3)
  • Social Security (3)
  • Tax Brackets (1)
  • Taxes (3)
  • Technology (1)
  • Year-End Planning (1)

Contact Us

 

Phone: 631-486-6625

Email: admin1@consciencebaycapital.com

1212 route 25A, suite 3C, Stony Brook, New York 11790

Get Directions

  • Sitemap
  • Legal, privacy, copyright and trademark information

Legal

All content on this site is for information purposes only and should not be viewed as investment advice. Materials presented on this site are believed to be from reliable sources and no representations are made by our firm as to another party’s informational accuracy or completeness.

Conscience Bay Capital, Incorporated and all of those affiliated with Conscience Bay Capital, Incorporated do not provide tax or legal advice. Nothing herein should be construed as such. Always consult with your tax advisor or legal counsel regarding your specific circumstances.

Securities and Advisory services offered through LPL Financial. A registered investment advisor. Member FINRA & SIPC.

The LPL Financial Registered Representatives associated with this site may only discuss and/or transact securities business with residents of the following states: CA, CO, FL, GA, NC, NJ, NY, OH, PA, TX.

This website has the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate which is used to secure information between the web browsers and the servers.  If you have any questions regarding the Cyber Security policies and procedures of Conscience Bay Capital, Incorporated, please contact: admin@consciencebaycapital.com

LPL Financial Form CRS

© 2025 Conscience Bay Capital Inc.. All rights reserved.

Website Design For Financial Services Professionals