Motley Fool Money - How Good is Your Investing Behavior?

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

Award-winning writer Morgan Housel shares how behavior can have a greater impact on your financial life than investing skills. His book The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness will be released September 8th.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're a small business owner, you already know what it takes to keep everything moving. You're juggling customers, invoices, and about 100 decisions every day. Thankfully, taxes don't have to be one more thing on that list. With Intuit TurboTax, you can get your business taxes done for you with a full service expert. TurboTax matches you with your dedicated tax expert. Who knows your industry understands your business write-offs and gives you the personalized advice your business deserves. upload your documents right in the app, hand everything off, and still feel like you're in the loop the whole way through. You can even get real-time updates on your expert's progress right in the app,

which makes it so much easier to stay on track. And you can get unlimited expert help at no extra cost, even on nights and weekends during tax season. Visit turbotax.com to get matched with an expert today, only available with TurboTax full service experts. With the Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. Morgan Housel is a partner with the Collaborative Fund and an award-winning financial writer. Two years ago, he wrote a piece entitled The Psychology of Money, where he laid out the case that investing is not the study of finance. Sure, there are numbers involved, and it helps to be good at math, but mastering the technical

side of money won't do you much good if you don't have a firm grip on your emotions. Because investing is really the study of how people behave with money. There's no amount of intelligence that can't be undone by poor emotions or poor behavior. And if you were to look at, if you were to make like a hierarchy of investor needs, like a pyramid, the base of that pyramid is good investor behavior. And then as you go up from there, you need analytical skills, you need to know how to model, you need to learn how to read an annual report and so on. But without investing behavior, and what I mean by behavior is your relationship with greed

and fear. ability to take a long-term view, your ability to react with to market ups and downs with a sense of calm and a sense of not taking things too seriously, not getting too overwhelmed by greed, not getting too knocked down by fear. That's what I mean by good investing behavior, saving consistently, dollar cost averaging. And it's one of the simplest points of investing, which is why it doesn't get that much attention. It's not that exciting. But I think it's unequivocally the most important part of investing. In the intervening two years, Morgan Hausel has been

digging deeper into the topic, and he's put his thoughts down in a new book. The Psychology of Money hits stores in early September. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.