Limited attention and …

One part of my academic research agenda deals with the effects of limited attention on professional investing. This paper uses marital events as a shock to attention and shows how managers behave differently when they’re getting married or divorced. We find that managers in general become less active in their trading/investing, suffer from behavioral biases more, and perform poorer.

This past semester, I moved from the Univ. of Florida to the Univ. of Alabama and prepped a couple of new classes. While not as stressful as marriage or divorce, I did devote a bit less time to my portfolio this semester … so what happened in my case?

The biggest change was (1) I rebalanced less… I probably ran my screen once or twice the entire semester to look for equities to deploy assets to. (2) I did not, even once, look for improvements to my screens or run any of my secondary screens.

The effects were not immediately felt on performance, but I suspect if I continued on this “autopilot” path, so to speak, the end result would be a less than manicured portfolio and eventually, a stale and less than robust investment screen. All in all, I feel my personal experience is consistent with what we found in the paper above.