Ted Richards

Form that opinion in hindsight, you know, but in the heat of the moment we become a bit more irrational.

I guess confirmation bias is not something that's only limited to investing, but that is a mistake people get where they form an opinion about something and that might be that they're a great stock picker or that...

This is an investment that needs to be made, whatever it is.

And confirmation bias, it's very hard to sidestep.

All they'll do is they'll look for all the evidence to support that that is a good decision and really discount anything that differs from that.

And I think we saw it a bit in politics and all these other parts of life and politics.

I'm probably guilty of it sometimes with my discussions at home without my wife.

But the last thing which I want to touch on is a common mistake that people can make and it's

it's described as the ostrich effect, and it's when kind of a bit the head in the sand approach, when many people have that approach to their superannuation where it's all too hard, things haven't worked out, I'm just going to forget about it.

And what's fantastic about your podcast and this engagement that I'm sure listeners have is

the earlier you can be engaged, educate yourself.

You don't have to get everything always right, but if you can really get some big things right and start as early as you can to harness the power of compound returns, you give yourself such an advantage later in life because...

this lack of engagement that some people have, it may not seem like a mistake, but before you know it, a decade can go by.

And if you go back, I know that we had the financial crisis in 2008, 2009.

Yeah, that's 10 years ago.

And a decision that could have been made 10 years ago to, I don't know, maybe just ensure that they're invested in the right super fund or maybe just to get a second opinion on some of the fees that they're paying.

that can have huge returns over compounding out over 10 years.

Yeah.

So, it's a very good question because we are wired the way we're wired to make decisions.

And all investing fundamentally is the decisions that we make with our own money.