4-minute Money Ideas

Can Optimism Increase Your Investment Returns? By Douglas Goldstein CFP® - helping olim handle their U.S. investments from Israel Are your investment returns determined by your worldview? Are people hardwired to be pessimists? Millions of years ago, if an optimistic caveman dismissed a rustle in a bush as the wind blowing, our ancestor may have ended up as a tiger’s lunch. As a result of this early conditioning, the part of our brain called the amygdala scans everything we see and hear for negative news. But according to Dr. Peter Diamandis, the founder of the coveted X Prize for Technology Innovation (and guest on The Goldstein On Gelt Show), this bias is more of a short circuit rather than an intelligent system design. He claims that in life and investing, it pays to be an optimist, as humans pay ten times more attention to negative news than positive news. Why optimism outperforms Technology is changing our lives for the better. A cursory list of human accomplishments over the past 100 years shows the futu