007: Paul Craven on financial market bias, magic & mental shortcuts

'How real people make real decisions in the real world'

My guest today is Paul Craven. Paul is a BS expert with close to 30 years experience in financial markets where he worked for Schroders, PIMCO and little known boutique Goldman Sachs. Under the umbrella now of Craven Partners, he is a keynote conference and after dinner speaker, covering topics such as decision making, investment and sales, all from a behavioural and psychological perspective. 

Paul is also a magician, a member of the Magic Circle and a hickory golf enthusiast.

Paul’s favourite definition of Behavioural Economics is “how real people make real decisions in the real world.” And this is at the heart of what Paul and I try to disentangle in our conversation.

Today’s podcast is in two parts. In Part 1 here, we discuss:

• Magic in business relationships
• The bandwagon effect and confirmation biases in investing
• The evolutionary value of decision making biases
• Hindsight bias & why Paul is too cool to do drugs
• Challenging pension fund investors
• The media's bias for bad news
• And superforecasting

Books referenced in the podcast

• Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein
• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
• Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling

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Enjoy the show,

Daniel

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• Podcast music: Tamsin Waley-Cohen's Mendelssohn's violin concerto