Book excerpt: Become a more strategic and successful investor by identifying the biases impacting your decision making. In Behavioral Finance and Your Portfolio, acclaimed investment advisor and author Michael M. Pompian delivers an insightful and thorough guide to countering the negative effect of cognitive and behavioral biases on your financial decisions. You’ll learn about the “Big Five” behavioral biases and how they’re reducing your returns and leading to unwanted and unnecessary costs in your portfolio. Designed for investors who are serious about maximizing their gains, in this book you’ll discover how to: ● Take control of your decision-making—even when challenging markets push greed and fear to intolerable levels ● Reflect on how to make investment decisions using data-backed and substantiated information instead of emotion and bias ● Counter deep-seated biases like loss aversion, hindsight and overconfidence with self-awareness and hard facts ● Identify your personal investment psychology profile, which you can use to inform your future financial decision making Behavioral Finance and Your Portfolio was created for individual investors, but will also earn a place in the libraries of financial advisors, planners and portfolio managers who are determined to counteract the less principled and data-driven aspects of their decision making.