Political Bias Affecting Investing Behavior
The episode of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots Podcast form August 11th was titled "The Biggest Lesson Investors Should Have Learned From the Crisis”, and there was a post about that a few weeks ago. The guest was Mark Dow, a global macro trader and financial blogger and it ended with something Joe Weisenthal said could be its own podcast(slightly paraphrased):
Alright Mark, I’m going to ask you one more question and its going to be really unfair because I’m going to ask the most controversial question but we have to do like a speed round. This is a question we could do a whole episode on: You say very few investors can disentangle their political preferences from economic analysis, what is the story there?
Examples can be easily thought of: those on the left discounting oil and gas energy companies and being willing to pay a higher premium for green energy companies, those on the right being more bullish after November 8th. Mark Dow’s answer can be summarized by saying, yes, investors do fall to the confirmation bias. So Monkeys, is this something that you try to be personally aware of either at work or in your PA’s? Are there methods that you apply to help limit internal biases that you might have that could be applied to political biases?