Do you have a voice in your head?

Most of us believe that we all have a voice in our head that we listen to.

This "voice in your head" is called "Inner Monologue".

It came as a surprise to me when my friend told me that many people do not have this inner monologue.

More on this research here:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/not-everyone-has-an-inner-voice-streaming-through-their-head/

How to find the truth behind what your (financial) agent tells you?

Here's a list of things that are mentioned here to detect lies by an agent.
How to tell when an agent (insurance, loan) is lying to you
Beyond this, there is one true test because at the end of the day, because actual "Numbers don't lie"*

Many agents typically sell you an investment product saying you pay x amount yearly for y years and the end of it, you get z amount. Plus, there is a bonus amount paid at the end of m years and every n years later. The agent says it as if the bonus is something free, something over and above what the company generally gives/supposed to give. This is just 'playing into' the customer's mind. Since, there are a number of different products, each with its own different flavour and rules, it is very difficult to comprehend what is the real returns expected out of the product. To decipher the real return expected out of the product, do the steps below. If you are not familiar with xls, take help of someone to follow the steps mentioned below:
Ask your agent to give you year wise, the ouflows (investment made, premiums paid, basically money going out of your pocket) and the inflows for every year (typically, a single or multiple bulk amounts at end of a number of years).
Open a new xls and enter the dates, the amount going out of your bank accounts as negative, the expected amounts as positive (in forms of bonus, returns, dividends, etc.) in three different rows.
Add these two amounts (outgo and inflow) in the next row (Row 4). (Click the pic below to zoom)

Then use the XIRR function with the net amounts as the first parameter and the dates as the second parameter to get the real compounded annual growth rate(CAGR).
CAGR describes the rate at which an investment would have grown if it grew at a steady rate. You can think of CAGR as a way to smooth out the returns.
Read more on CAGR

* Numbers don't lie, but reading the numbers in a false context/background/with bias, interpretation of numbers could lead to lies. e.g.: The Indian stock market had gone up by leaps and bounds between the period 2003 and 2008 and those numbers do not lie. But expecting that same kind of growth at any other point in time (as the environment would be different wrt to interest rates, policies, inflation, currency rates, oil prices, global liquidity, attractiveness of Indian stock market vis-a-vis the other global stock markets, investor sentiment, etc.) could be equivalent to lies. If an agent shows you the best period of growth and tells you that this can be expected in the future also, do ask for the worst period of returns and ask him/her why that the worst could not repeat.

Addiction of Internet

How to tax the Rich

An article by Scott Adams

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703293204576106164123424314.html

Typical investor behaviour

A WSJ article:

"If people were watching their investments, they would not sit idly by and be victimized, but would act. Instead, people are busy with everything from their favorite TV series to golf, and are blind-sided when they find out about their losses. These people pay the same amount of attention to the political issues and candidates. They are like deer wandering around in the forest with targets painted on their sides."

How stress changes the look

The astonishing pictures show how a tour of Afghanistan transforms the features of these relaxed-looking men and women into careworn, hard-bitten masks. 

Even more amazingly, their faces dramatically soften again on their return from their three-month trips.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086319/Faces-war-The-soldiers-courage-suffering-etched-line.html 

Procrastination

An excellent article on Procrastination (long but worth it)
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/10/27/procrastination/

In diagrams

Src: www.thisisindexed.com

Revenge v/s Aim

If a person wrongs you intentionally or otherwise, you can either leave it and carry on with your more important things in your life or take revenge in a variety of ways(scheming, embarrasing, character assasination, confront him, etc). But if a company wrongs you by way of making losses(intentionally by fraud or otherwise), you cant take revenge in any effective manner. The company cant make up the money it has lost of its shareholders just because you didnt like it making losses. At maximum, you can try to change the management with your shareholder vote or shout at the shareholder's meeting or sell the stock and get out.

The best way to respond in the stock market for a company that has made losses for you is to dump it if you dont see any future prospect of it making profits and carry on with your life with other important things and opportunities. 

Everyone enters into the stock market with the aim of growing their portfolio/money/assets, but many of us hold back selling the loss making stock and want it to make up for the loss it has made. Sorry to dissapoint you, but get your emotions out of investing and start thinking logically. Dont forget that no one can take revenge on companies in the stock market and it would be fool hardy to be there holding the loss making company shares just to take revenge or blindly being hopeful on it. Dont miss the other opportunities while crying over spilt milk!

Psychology

Seen behind a T-shirt:

Psychology

Batch 09

"Your mind is my business"

Women are very obedient!

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram's subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a puppy who was given real electric shocks. They found that 20 out of the 26 participants complied to the end. The six that had refused to comply were all male (54% of males were obedient); all 13 of the women obeyed to the end, although many were highly disturbed and some openly wept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Drowning in smells

So you use a soap/body lotion, a moisturiser, some talc, deodarent, hair oil/gel/cream, face wash, face scrub, mouthwash, hand wash; shaving cream & after shave(for men); and many more products for women.

Have you tried counting how many of them have a neutral or no smell in them. If you are going by the lastest or the most fashionable of the products, it is very likely that you will find it hard to even find one or two of them with no smell. So in that case you are daily using a concoction of products with smells across the spectrum from sandalwood handwash to menthol shaving cream to walnut face wash to jasmine talc to metal deoderants. Interesting! So what exact smell do you want to convey to yourself and to people around you? 

The more ironic thing about this is apart from the deodarant, most of the other products we use have a smell only when we bring out nose to the product and smell it and many of them are used in such a way that they are washed off(soap, scrub, face wash, shaving cream).

So what significant benefit do these products, each of which comes in tens of flavours really serve? 

Do people buy and use varied smelling products for just the initial virgin smell of it while using it? Do they really want to override the previous smell with the next product they use? Do they think the people close to them will smell all the flavours that they have used?

I dont know if today's marketers' have done any study relating to this. The FMCG marketers are too category focussed to sell their products and I dont think they would have thought of the overall strategic smell a person really wants to emit/give out. Maybe the biggie FMCGs should think about  making products with a strategic smell in mind.

Practical Business lessons from social psychology

http://www.businesspundit.com/12-practical-business-lessons-from-social-psychology/

An excellent read and some readily applicable...

Life's like that! Really?

People: One of those topics I have wondered often on...

I know more than just a handful of them. And many things about them are so difficult to comprehend. Not sure if so many people have a common attitude and common beliefs or is each one different in their own way but have common traits with some group of people. I have certain notions about some things about people. But I am not sure since many of my held notions have broken. I am constantly trying to find out if my notion was itself wrong in the first place or if my notion was right and people have changed by finding other notions to live up to. Notions are so personal to each one that it is very difficult to share with just about anyone around and that just complicates things to get my answer. I am not satisfied with the answer "Life's like that". I want to know why is it that Life's like that? Have people actually done something or made an effort to stop something that they love calling  "Life's like that" ?

"Life's like that!" 

Really? Or is it just convenient that way for people to do whatever they want and use this statement as a justification ?

The Wise Old Man

A story about reverse psychology: A retired man moves near a junior high school. He spends the first few weeks of retirement in peace and quiet. However, when a new school year begins, three young boys beat on every trash can they encounter every day on their way home from school. Finally, the man decides to take action and walks out to meet the boys. He says, "You kids are a lot of fun. I'll give you each a dollar if you'll promise to come around every day and do your thing." The kids continue to do a bang-up job on the trashcans. After a few days, the man tells the kids, "This recession's really putting a big dent in my income. From now on, I'll only be able to pay you 50 cents to beat on the cans." The noisemakers are displeased, but they accept his offer. A few days later, the retiree approaches them again. "Look," he says, "I haven't received my Social Security check yet, so I'm not going to be able to pay more than 25 cents. Will that be OK?" "A freakin' quarter?" the drum leader exclaims. "If you think we're going to waste our time beating these cans around for a quarter, you're nuts. We quit."

Whats the solution

I read a message from a middle aged corporate manager who lost his job in 1988 and still without permanent work in 1992 say "I have lost the fight to stay ahead in today's economy... I was determined to find work, but as the months and years wore on, depression set in. You can only be rejected so many times; then you start questioning your self-worth" in the economics textbook regarding unemployment. I am wondering what kind of motivation or event will be required to get this man out of his psychological scar.

Fear factor

When I booked my train ticket from Chennai to Ahmedabad on 3AC, I had 9 available seats last week and I got one for me. Interestingly, when I travelled in the train, I saw far more than 8 empty seats in 3AC. So it means only one thing - Many of the people have cancelled their tickets. The Reason - Ahmedabad is unsafe after the bomb blasts. Well, I dont think so. You are as safe or unsafe in any other city in India as you are in Ahmedabad barring certain parts of Jammu and Kashmir and naxalite prone areas where the risk level is usually at higher levels. On the day (friday) of the Bangalore blasts, I am sure I would be one of those very few people who had a thought crossing the mind that they had wished that they were in Bangalore on that weekend so that they could catch a movie in theater on that saturday or sunday. Oh! come on. Stop cursing me now.

Who dares wins

So why is the stock market one of the riskiest places to invest? There are quite some risks that stretch beyond the risk of losing money. They include psychological risks - the risk of losing one's ego and self esteem, risk of losing your peace of mind and your sleep. This in turn will risk everything else in your life. If you are incapable or uncomfortable taking this psychological risk head on, don't get into the stock markets!!!