I recently read a story online about Leonard Nimoy.
He said the character Spock – which he played 12-14 hours per day, 5 days per week – influenced his personality in his private life.
After playing the character all week, he found himself on Sundays talking, thinking, and behaving like Spock.
In effect, playing a more logical, more rational, more thoughtful, and less emotional character made him more logical, more rational, and less emotional, finding calm in every situation more easily “off camera”.
That is, until the end of the day on Fridays.
By then, his usual personality came back only to start the cycle again Sunday.
Even years later, long after the show ended, he caught himself having Vulcan speech patterns, social attitudes, logic patterns, suppressing emotions etc.
Fascinating stuff…
Made me think being a Vulcan would come in handy with everything going on the world and financial markets right about now: wars and rumors of wars, inflation, rising rates, supply-chain issues, market losses…
The just-released Dalbar Annual QAIB report examines real investor returns from 1985 through the end of 2021, which encompasses the crash of 1987, bull market of the 90’s, the drop at the turn of the millennium, the crash of 2008, recovery periods leading up to the most recent bull market, and the unprecedented events of 2020.
Some key findings of how real (human) investors did in 2021 (as opposed to institutional investors and market indexes):
- The average Equity Investor had a net ‘withdrawal’ in 2022 (this is in a year that the S&P was up 28%! Seems like a bad year to be moving out of equities).
- The average Equity Investor underperformed the S&P by over 10%!
Why do real investors consistently underperform the market indexes?
Because we are human, not Vulcan, and we make emotional investment decisions.
Especially when it comes to our life savings the closer we get or in retirement.
My primary job as a retirement coach and fiduciary is put a proactive retirement plan in place that YOU are comfortable with – that will take the emotions out of investing in retirement so you can focus on all the stuff that really matters.
Live long and prosper indeed.
To learn more, beam up here:
Craig Misuradze