The human brain is naturally wired to want to invest more in top performing assets and to pull out of assets that have performed badly. This recency bias, as it's termed in behavioral finance, is always more pronounced at the beginning of a new year.
This year is no exception, said Charlie Bilello, director of research at Pension Partners and manager of the Inflation and Beta Rotation Funds. As in years past, Bilello said, "most investors think that whatever did well last year will repeat this year."
This year, that means investors want to put more money into U.S. stocks.
"This happened last year, too, since U.S. stocks had a great year and outpaced their global peers," Bilello said. "So just as it was at the start of 2014, when investors were thinking that based on 2013′s performance the S&P would continue to go up, they're thinking the same thing at the start of 2015."
The attraction to U.S. stocks is even greater because the S&P has outperformed the MSCI World Index for the past five years, Bilello said. Yet financial advisors know that allowing recency bias to guide investment decisions is not the wisest course of action and can prove counterproductive, since the best way to invest is to "keep a mixed and diversified portfolio that can grow wealth over time and to do the opposite of what recent markets have done," Bilello said.
Steering investors away from their natural tendency to give undue weight to recent market events—positive as well as negative—isn't an easy thing for advisors to do, but it's important, said Anthony Criscuolo, client services manager at Palisades Hudson Financial Group.
"Investors are calling us up and saying, 'Why don't we put more into the S&P 500 and less into international markets and the natural resources market?'" Criscuolo said. "They think that the S&P is going to continue to do great, that the U.S. will keep growing and that the problems in Europe will go on forever, but ultimately, trends reverse, and we need to get our clients to stand back and take a global view of the markets and of various asset classes."
Because individual investors have a strong emotional tie to their money, advisors need to "emotionally counsel" them to steer away from their emotions in order to "make decisions based on fact and reason," Criscuolo said. The recency bias typically follows major news cycles—"so you could see it happening in the middle of the year as much as it's happening right now"—but it's key for advisors to talk their clients through the tendency to be in the moment, he said.
