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How Fear and Greed Affect Investing Decisions

The ride is volatile; the decisions do not have to be. FinEdge's published position is that managing your own behaviour through the cycle — rather than reacting to it — is one of the most important aspects of successful investing.

Mayank Bhatnagar·Co-Founder & COO·12 October 2023

What this covers

The two failure modes named in the published note are greed and fear. Both convert a market movement into a portfolio decision, which is the moment a long-term plan usually breaks.

The counterweight is a rational frame: decide against the goal, not against the last quarter. That is also what makes a review different from a reaction.

Judge the plan against the goal. Market movement on its own is not new information about your goal.

Full transcript

FinEdge Video Content Review — Investing Behaviour and the investing roller coaster, section 6 Full Transcript. Supplied by Leadership, 27 August 2026.

The best funds to invest in are easily available on Google. Why is it then most people fail to create wealth?

Research shows 98% of investors leave their investment journey within the first 12 to 24 months.

The reason for this is that we are our own worst enemies when it comes to investing.

Today, with so much information clutter, our emotions of greed and fear have amplified.

The truth is, money is very important and we have an extremely emotional relationship with money.

This is the reason why we find it difficult to remain invested.

Ideally, we need an expert to help us not only to manage our investments well, but also to manage our emotions, help us deal with market volatility and to remain invested so that compounding can play its role in creating wealth for us.

Getting quality advice has its costs, but it's a lot lower than not meeting your goals.

Choose wisely.