Behavioural bias explorer
Recognise the six behavioural patterns that cost Indian retail investors the most — starting with the ones you have already done this year.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere. Educational only, and not investment advice.
How to use this calculator
Each step names a control you will find on screen above.
- Pick a bias
Six of them. Read the description before the example and see whether you can predict what the example will be.
- Read the Indian example
Each comes with a situation from this market rather than an American textbook. Recognition is the entire mechanism here.
- Read the counter-measure
A specific, mechanical defence. Knowing about a bias does not reduce it; changing the process does.
- Be honest about which two are yours
Everyone has two that dominate. Identifying them is worth more than a general awareness of all six.
Worked example: Loss aversion, in a real portfolio
Select loss aversion — the tendency to feel a loss roughly twice as strongly as an equivalent gain.
What to enter
- Bias
- Loss aversion
What it shows you
- What it feels like
- "I will sell once it comes back to my price"
- What it produces
- Winners sold early, losers held for years
- The tell
- A portfolio of small gains and one enormous loss
- The counter-measure
- A written exit rule, decided before entry
- Why awareness fails
- The bias operates on the decision, not the knowledge
Where this is taught
A calculator gives you a number. These explain what the number means and when it misleads you.
- Risk & Psychology12 minThe biases that cost the most moneyLoss aversion, anchoring, confirmation, recency, herding and overconfidence — how each shows up in an Indian portfolio, and the specific counter-move for each.
- Risk & Psychology11 minRegret: sold too early, held too longRegret is the emotion that distorts investing decisions most, and the only one that operates on trades you never made.
- Risk & Psychology13 minThe words you decide inHalf the ordinary vocabulary of Indian investing has an answer built into it. The neutral-restatement test, and what happens to a decision once the euphemism is removed.
- Risk & Psychology13 minChoosing what to sell when you need the moneyLife presents a rupee figure and a date. Which holding funds it is decided in about four minutes, usually by whichever sale feels least like an admission.
- Technical Analysis11 minDo candlestick patterns actually work?How to answer that for yourself with a notebook and forty occurrences, instead of trusting a table that says a morning star is 78% reliable.