Wow. Summer is busy even after classes are over! I thought I'd have more time to post but, as usual, we can't get what we want... Anyway, this is an interesting article that appeared in the FT about a hedge fund that uses behavioral finance techniques to invest.
Personally, I believe that behavioral finance brings essential insights on how financial models should strive to incorporate the idiosyncracies of human behavior rather than to take the easy way out and assume that investors are perfectly rational. However, up to now at least, I think that behavioral finance is still at a point in which is more like a collection of results challenging the current paradigm ("mainstream" finance) but still not able to come up with a good alternative theory. I'm not sure it ever will given how "strange" human beings can be whenever money is involved (or generally).
Altogether the article is very interesting and contains a useful introduction to behavioral finance. The trading strategy looks interesting too! Here is the beginning:
Before you even started reading this article, it had already been electronically scanned and its language examined by dozens of computers at hedge funds and investment banks.
At MarketPsy Capital in Santa Monica, California, remote servers will have rated how positive or negative it is on the economy and checked for emotional content on thousands of companies. Finding nothing useful, the computers will then move on.
