Weekend Reading for Financial Advisers: The Super Bowl, the Beatles, and Abraham Lincoln

Here is a smattering of articles, videos, cartoons, drawings, and infographics that recently caught my attention, in case you missed them.

Behavioral Finance

• Dilbert’s take on that favorite behavioral bias: overconfidence. (Dilbert comic strip)
• A great infographic of our brains on behavioral economics. And the accompanying article: “Six Ways Our Brains Make Bad Financial Decisions.” (The Globe and Mail)
• Bob Seawright’s blog post on investors’ 10 most common behavioral biases was the most popular post on his blog in 2012. But, as he notes, we don’t think we are personally susceptible to them. In a recent post, he offers 10 suggestions for ways to deal with our cognitive and behavioral biases. (Above the Market)
• “The Sketch Guy,” Carl Richards, shows how we have to earn our returns. Richards is speaking at our upcoming Wealth Management conference in Boston, 21–22 March. (New York Times via The Big Picture)

Leadership/Practice Management/Stress Management

• Abraham Lincoln as management guru: “Lincoln’s School of Management.” (New York Times)
• Josh Brown, a.k.a. the Reformed Broker, offers 10 business lessons he learned from the Beatles. (Money & Markets)
• As one tweeter put it, “How to be lazy, put off things you have to do AND be productive.” (Structured Procrastination)
• From the author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, nine ways successful people beat stress. (HBR Blog Network)
• Here’s a scary fact: “As we work, we sit more than we do anything else. We’re averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping.” The upshot? Sitting is the smoking of our generation. (HBR Blog Network)
• Why extroverts fail, introverts flounder, and you probably succeed. (Washington Post)

Technology/Baby Boomers

• Any financial advisers out there who think you don’t need to embrace technology to serve Baby Boomers — the generation that is turning 65 at a rate of about 10,000 a day? (By 2030, 20% of Americans will be age 65 of older.) According to an article on why iPad and tablet users skew older, among adults, the fastest-growing group of iPad (AAPL) users are 65 and over. (MartetWatch)
• While on the topic of aging clients, I read a touching essay on Alzheimer’s, “Waiting for the Forgetting to Begin,” that really resonated in the wake of a sobering session on elder law at the Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning. (New York Times)
• Last year I wrote about five ways financial advisors can better serve clients with chronic illnesses. (Enterprising Investor)

The Financial Crisis

• The financial crisis explained by a simple equation. (And that equation is? Cue drumroll: Leveraged return.) “The Real, and Simple, Equation That Killed Wall Street.” (Scientific American)

Marketing/Investment Policy Statement

• Michael Kitces, certified financial planner and author of the Nerd’s Eye View blog, said it best in his tweet on this promotional video: “Wow. Now *THIS* is how all advisors should be explaining the importance of an Investment Policy Statement.” (Sherrill Wealth Management, video)

Risk Management

• When was the last time showers, forests, and native New Guineans appeared in the same context as risk? Well, the wait is over. In “That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer,” the writer discusses the concept of “constructive paranoia” in the context of what he has learned from 50 years of field work on the island of New Guinea: the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently. (New York Times)

Charitable Donations

• In this blog post, Kitces responds to a reader’s inquiry on whether it’s still a good deal to donate appreciated securities to a charity, now that the rules are back allowing qualified charitable distributions (QCDs) directly from an IRA to a charity. (Nerd’s Eye View)

Super Bowl Sunday

• In a tweet about his article “Super Bowl Indicator: The Secret History,” Jason Zweig cautions that if anyone “blathers to you about the ‘Superbowl Indicator,’ tie this sockful of garlic around your neck.” (Wall Street Journal)

And Now For Something Completely Different

• This Shouts and Murmurs column about out-of-office emails had me laughing out loud: “Automatic Reply”. (The New Yorker)

Please note that the content of this site should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute.

Photo credit: ©iStockphoto.com/JLGutierrez