Dr. Daniel Crosby

You don't hear about the person who sort of drunkenly stumbled into traffic trying to take a selfie.

Right.

Even though it happens many, many times more, it's far more likely that you get hurt taking a selfie than that you get bit by a shark.

So we tend to confuse things that are improbable and sort of loud and scary with things that are likely to happen when that tends not to be the case.

And then finally, there's conservatism, which is our tendency to have a preference for things that we know and our tendency to prefer things that feel safe.

So like an example of this is,

An example of this, I lived in Canada.

I lived in Western Canada for about four months and it was awesome.

And I totally love Canada and Canadians were the nicest people ever.

But, you know, I was working at a bank there.

And when you look at the portfolios of the people who come in, they were consistently 80 to 90 percent Canadian equities.

You know, Canada represents like 3.5% of the world's equity, and yet these folks had 90% of their wealth in Canadian equities, which are like heavily skewed towards things like timber and oil.

And so they end up taking a very concentrated bet

based on their familiarity with the economy of Canada.

And it ends up that you sort of triple stack your bet, right?

It's like you live in Canada, you work in Canada, now you own all these Canadian stocks.

You're kind of living and dying with the fortunes of Canada.

And so I'm not picking on Canadians.

People all over the world do this.

Americans do this too.