One of my favourite experiments @ArrowTrades

The other bit of research i like is the finding that we prefer to take an electric shock, rather than sit quietly alone in a room for 15 minutes.

It very much echoes Blaise Pascal's “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” And we can very easily replace 'humanity' with 'investors' in that sentence.

It's why I always liked Buffett's quip -- "Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style"

@ArrowTrades i used to get upset by things like that until i realised those guys are on the other side of my trades....hopefully :)

Also read some newsletters this morning and came across the below... so there you go. This doesn't help that they were told it was 60% though lol.

• Coin flips are not exactly 50/50. *

Source: mentalfloss.com, wikipedia.com, chartr.com

* Mathematicians have long suspected that coins tend to land on one side slightly more often than the other. Proving this, however, would require hundreds of thousands of meticulously recorded coin flips. Quite frankly, no one could be bothered, not even mathematicians! That is, until about 4 years ago, when Dutch PhD student Frantisek Bartos took on the challenge. He recruited 47 volunteers from six countries, many of them friends and fellow students. Multiple weekends of coin flipping later, the team had performed 350,757 tosses, shattering the previous record of 40,000.

The results? The flipped coins landed with the same side facing upward as before the toss 50.8% of the time. The large number of throws and 50.8% / 49.2% ratio allowed Bartos to conclude that there is a definite bias in coin flips. The reason for the bias comes down to physics. From the moment a coin is launched into the air, its entire trajectory can apparently be calculated by the laws of mechanics. Essentially, airborne coins tend to wobble off centre. This causes them to spend a little more time with their initial “up” side on top, thus increasing the chances of that same side being on top after the flip.

Interesting, would make sense give its a tangible man made object.

In real life scenarios You definitely need to think about many other factors... When you walk past the guy on the Vegas strip sitting behind his cardboard box offering incredible odds on a dice roll, it pays not to be to theoretical!

Yep that's a good one. An analogy on patience I like on that, is a soccer study that concluded penalty kick distribution was around 1/3 left, 1/3 right, 1/3 straight.

Goal keepers however dive left or right 90% of the time. When asked why they rarely stay In the middle the standard reply was:

"Because I would feel like I was doing nothing"

They sure are, especially in meme stocks that attract retail investors... offers another way to play the market than the traditional the stock is too cheap.

If you desire, you can bet on something overpriced going higher in the near term knowing that people like this make up the herd driving the price.

I hadn't heard of that soccer study @ArrowTrades -- that's excellent.

And now I know that about coins @Mujo , I will always call whatever is face up before the flip. I don't care how tiny the edge is! lol

Also, @Solvetheriddle, that's exactly how I try and look at it too. I just hope I'm not the patsy at the table :)

I might use this knowledge on Anzac day!