Tuesday 16 June 2009

Analysts think markets are 'irrational'

Quite amusing.
Investors irrational says CFA UK survey

CFA UK Survey Reveals that over two-thirds of financial professionals believe that markets behave irrationally.

Members of CFA UK report low levels of belief in market efficiency and investor rationality. A recently conducted survey shows that the vast majority (77%) of the 438 respondents believe that investors don't behave rationally as individuals.

Worryingly, 67% believe that investors in aggregate also fail to behave rationally. And the same proportion disagree with the statement that market prices fully reflect all available information.

Behavioural finance comes out of the survey with greater support. Most respondents believe that behaviour finance is a useful addition to modern portfolio theory (86%). Though most (76%) agree that it is not yet sufficiently robust to replace modern portfolio theory as the basis for investment thought.

1 comment:

Tom Powdrill said...

Good question. I presume they do, though certainly a lot more analysts are interested in the behavioural finance side of things these days, so perhaps that brings with a bit of scepticism about their own rationality.