It's finally here! More commentary to follow, but in the meantime a link back (video above, posts below) to a humorous take on this historic occasion. http://blog.marketpsych.com/2012/02/marketpsych-films-facebook-ipo-part-i.html http://blog.marketpsych.com/2012/02/facebook-to-have-ipo-worlds-colliding.html Happy Investing. And hey... let's be careful out there. -Dr. Frankenstocks.www.marketpsych.com

As we age, our financial decision making changes.  And more often financial advisors are being held liable for their clients' (impaired) decisions. The MarketPsych team created the MEMRI script, described in this AdvisorOne article by Savita Iyer and in its full version in this pdf to help advisors improve client service.   We hope this simple 5-point MEMRI checklist improves advisors' abilities to spot developing problems in aging clients. To learn more about financial decision...

A short and light Fox News report on trading on social media (and the data we generate for funds and banks) is here. They have some great stock footage of our friends Mike Waldron and Matt Pringle at Shoreline Trading! We ran a hedge fund using our social media data from September 2, 2008 through December 31, 2010 - when we hibernated it due to lack of funding (despite the fund being up, it was difficult to raise money for it).  The fund beat the S&P 500 by 27% over that period....

MarketPsych Data analyzed Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder letters to determine who is most likely to be Warren Buffett's successor.  Our results, and an excellent article about the project, appear in Jason Zweig's column in today's WSJ. Using our software, which specifically detects emotive words and relationships, we identified the individuals who Warren Buffett referenced most positively in the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters from 1995-2011.  Our software scanned...

Shorting Bubbles – Ouch! I’ve made many unfortunate investments over the years, but one in particular still bothers me.  In 1998 it was very clear that the technology sector was in the midst of a historic bubble.  There were many overvalued stocks – with no earnings, high debt, too-good-to-be-true stories, and extremely high valuations.  I picked Amazon.com due to its high level of hype, and I sold short some shares. A few months later I had lost...

Behavioral Investment Management: An Efficient Alternative to Modern Portfolio Theory by Greg B. Davies and Arnaud De Servigny (McGraw-Hill, 2012)“People in standard finance are rational. People in behavioral finance are normal.” Meir Statman, PhD, Santa Clara UniversityThe above quote by Meir Statman captures concisely the thrust of the concepts explored extensively in this new book by Greg Davies and Arnaud De Servigny.  They tackle what is by now a relatively widespread view that modern...

When I was a boy in west Texas the neighborhood children enjoyed playing chicken, usually with speeding shopping carts.  Two children were pilots and two children were bombs.  The pilots dutifully ran their bombs up to full speed, released them, and … CRASH.  Ideally your shopping cart remained standing after the collision, in which case you won.  Fortunately, two shopping carts crashing sounds much more painful than it actually was.  But this newsletter...

MarketPsych's first digital film installment on the Facebook IPO from our "Bob and Helen" series for financial advisors. Link HERE or click on Red Curtain Above. Also a shout out to Melissa Lee of CNBC for noticing the deja vu of "new metrics" being trotted out in support of Internet stocks. (Nice to know we aren't the only ones who felt it.) Enjoy. (Note: It looks like ZNGA is beginning to reward it's shareholders. We wish them well.) Happy Investing. And hey... let's be careful out there....

“Yeah, I know.” These words came from my brother, Loring, and their significance was unmistakeable – worlds have collided. My brother is an actor and filmmaker (quite talented too, www.mcquaidbrothers.com, http://twitter.com/loringmurtha). He is about as far removed from the world of investing as one can get. In fact, I suspect he couldn't name more than one holding in his managed portfolio. But when I mentioned to him the other day that “Facebook is having its IPO. IPO stands for Initial Pub-“...

Facebook, Social Unrest, and the Predictive Power of Big Data                        Feb 2012, v2, n1 The Value of Social Media (seriously!) I tried to close my Facebook account once.  Somehow I continued to receive “Friend” notifications in my email.  So I tried to close my account again.  The notifications still came. ...