Meditation
Investors confront four main problems on a daily basis:
- High levels of stress,
- High demands to think at their very best,
- Behavioral biases, and
- Ethical dilemmas.
Meditation offers practicioners a proven means of ameliorating each of these problems.
Jason Voss, CFA, shares his Weekend Reads for Investors selections. This month's stories consider shadow banking in China, how connected minds have higher IQs, an earth-shaking announcement from BlackRock, and more.
Risk intelligence, the importance of meditation for investment pros, and dynamical dark energy are just some of the topics covered in this week's Weekend Reads for Investors, curated by Jason Voss, CFA.
Visualization meditation, or creative visualization, is a basic meditation practice that features a tremendous variety and depth of techniques.
Focused awareness meditation asks practitioners to focus their awareness singularly on one object. Among the benefits for investment professionals is an improvement in mental focus and clarity.
Jason Voss, CFA, provides a primer on open-monitoring meditation, along with a sample practice, in the latest edition of his Meditation Tips for Investment Professionals series.
Meditation is a mind practice that helps develop two skills that are critical for investors, says Jason Voss, CFA: metacognition, or the awareness of awareness itself; and top-down control, choosing what to think and when to think it. Why do we need these skills? Because as investors we must see the world for what it is, not what we prefer it to be. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you get started as a meditator.
Jason Voss, CFA, shares his curated list of Weekend Reads for Investors. Featured stories explore the fake news epidemic, peer into one of the world's most successful and secretive hedge funds, and estimate the daily operating costs of the Death Star.
Meditation is a proven way of overcoming behavioral biases. One of the leading neuroscientists researching the issue, Ulrich Kirk, explains his findings in an interview with Jason Voss, CFA.
Investment professionals make difficult decisions based on incomplete information. That is part of the job. But are we any good at it? And more importantly, do we achieve certainty when we make these tough decisions? The answer to the latter question — with great certainty — is no.
"It's very easy for many of us to feel out of control," said mindfulness expert Jeremy Hunter. "We live too much on gas pedal, too much on brake." But there is a way to get back to what Hunter calls our "zone of resilience — a capacity to be calm." The key to doing that is the practice of mindfulness.