$3.62. That’s the price for a gallon of regular unleaded gas at the station down from my house. This means that if I drive my 13 mpg truck to the Hardee’s 10 miles away, I will spend more on gas for the round trip than I will on their delicious delicious Thickburger.

^ Patties now almost 70% meat

“But Jake,” you might be saying, “whatever is your point?” Alas, I won’t answer, because my name isn’t Jake.

But if it was, I’d point out that there are several plans floating around the interwebs purporting to “stick it the the man” and lower gas prices for good, so that we can get back to worrying about important things such as Prince William’s wedding. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Here’s why.

Scheme #1: Participating in a one-day boycott of gasoline will lower gas prices.

The premise of these chain emails, often typed in capital letters and with poor diction, is that if everyone in the US declined to purchase gas on the same day, billions of dollars would be taken out of Big Oil’s pockets and they would tremble before the power of the common man and justice would prevail and “Jersey Shore” would be canceled. Or something.

^ No punch line necessary.

The problem with this plan, which anyone over the age of conception should easily discern, is that it doesn’t affect overall consumption but simply shifts purchases to the previous or subsequent day. Exxon will make $2 billion less on Thursday and $2 billion more on Friday.

Scheme #2: Participating in an extended boycott of selected gas companies will lower oil prices.

Sample email: “For the rest of this year, DON’T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.”

The reason it won’t work is simple. It doesn’t affect demand, just shifts it to a different company.

Economics Prof. Pat Welch of St. Louis University says any boycott of “bad guy” gasoline in favor of “good guy” brands would have some unintended (and unhappy) results.

Welch says the law of supply and demand is set in stone. “To meet the sudden demand,” he says, “the good guys would have to buy gasoline wholesale from the bad guys, who are suddenly stuck with unwanted gasoline.”

So motorists would end up…paying more for it, because they’d be buying it at fewer stations.

And yes, oil companies do buy and sell from one another. Mike Right of AAA Missouri says, “If a company has a station that can be served more economically by a competitor’s refinery, they’ll do it.”

Oil is extraordinarily fungible.Fungible: a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. At the Shell station, you would never know that you were pumping Exxon gas into your tank. The gas is interchangeable, just like those socialite darlings Paris Hilton, Jamie Ramada, and Mildred Motel Six.

Scheme #3: Consumers’ buying only a few gallons of gas at a time will bring down the price of gasoline.

You can read the full, slightly disturbing email, but the premise is that if drivers didn’t fill up their tanks every time they stopped for gas, but instead only bought a few gallons at a time, the reduction in purchases would create a glut of unsold gas that would clog up the supply chain from dealerships to tank farms to refineries to tankers. In order to avoid being overwhelmed with unsold product, the gasoline industry would have to drop their prices in order to clear out the surplus and free up storage capacity for incoming supplies.

The problem is that this notion simply shifts motorists from driving with full tanks to half-full tanksNotice I didn’t say half-empty. I’m an optimist and will result in motorists stopping more often for small refills instead of one large refill.

Scheme #4: Signing a petition to the president will meaningfully lower gas prices.

Gasoline and Diesel Prices

PETITION FOR PRES. BUSH Presidential Petition. Please do NOT let this petition stop and lose all these names. If you do not want to sign it, please forward it to everyone you know.

To add your name, click on “forward”. You will be able to add your name at the bottom of the list and then forward it to your friends. Or, if necessary you can copy and paste and then add your name po the bottom of the list.

THE 2,000th PERSON PLEASE SEND IT ON TO THE FOLLOWING

E-MAIL ADDRESS: President@WhiteHouse.gov Thank you very much.

PETITION TO LOWER GAS and Diesel PRICES IN THE UNITED STATES NOW

I’m betting that the president is aware of current oil prices. There’s also not much the President or Congress can do to significantly affect them, at least in the short term.

Conclusion
Econ 101 teaches us that prices are a function of supply and demand. In all of the plans above, neither factor is being affected. I can’t stress this enough. If you receive a chain email promising to lower prices at the pump, ask yourself whether the plan will result in a long-term increase in supply or a long-term decrease in demand. If the answer to both is “No”, you can safely delete the mail and return to your normal internet procrastination involving pictures of cats and funny Youtube videos.

Do effective actions exist? Sure. You most likely can’t affect the supply-side, so affect the demand side. Get a vehicle with higher gas mileage, such as a smaller car or motorcycle.I just bought a used motorcycle that was leaking oil, so I took it to a dealer who told me I needed a new O-ring. Isn’t the phrase “o-ring” redundant? Discuss. Carpool. Take public transportation.

These actions aren’t as sexy as boycotts. But, in the end, aren’t they the same thing?

Postscript: If you get any emails containing sketchy “facts”, such as the asserting that our president is a Muslim, the moon landing didn’t happen, or peanut butter and chocolate aren’t delicious together, please do the world a favor and do a quick search on Snopes.com to check the validity of the content before forwarding to your entire contact list.

“How should I spend my money?” It’s as basic a question as “Paper or plastic?” or “Why is Criss Angel popular?”

^ I want to punch him in the face with my foot.

There are infinite ways to break expenses down, but one of the simplest is things vs. experiences. You can buy an iPod or go skydiving. You can have a new laptop or you can go to Hawaii. Surprisingly, study after study after study shows that people report feeling happier when they spend their money on experiences rather than objects.

“ ‘It’s better to go on a vacation than buy a new couch’ is basically the idea,” says Professor Dunn.

This revelation is surprising, because a vacation or cooking class doesn’t leave you with a tangible and lasting possession like buying a Playstation does. However, do this for me: reminisce back on your vacations and try to think about a few of them that you wish you hadn’t taken. Even if it rained the whole time and your hotel smelled like New Jersey and your airplane seatbuddy on the way back was Dr. Phil, you still remember that one sunset where the weather was perfect and your margarita was strong.

^ Dr. Phil = kinda creepy

On the other hand, your iPod/laptop/waterbed somehow doesn’t inspire the same daily feelings as that lovely vacation memory. We humans have something called “hedonic adaptation“, which means that we adapt very well to major positive or negative events or life changes, whether they be winning the lottery or the loss of a close family member. We are so adaptable to seemingly life-changing events that six months from now we won’t even notice our new Porsche or diamond tennis bracelet. Sad but true.

It turns out that this logic works in reverse for experiences – we usually remember the good parts and gloss over the memories of overaggressive TSA pat-downs and underwhelming seafood dinners.

(An additional point on this matter is that, while things are very rarely free, experiences often are. It doesn’t cost anything to go for a run or to throw rocks at trains.)

So, that’s the recommendation based on my research. Skip the new couch. Go to Hawaii.

In my review of the book “The Four Pillars Of Investing”, I touched on the author’s comments on the psychology of investing, and how investors repeatedly make the same mistakes, much like Charlie Sheen.

^ When I die I want Charlie Sheen’s life to flash before my eyes.

I’m going to go over a few more of these mistakes today, in the belief that just knowing about the existence of common biases can make us less likely to fall prey to them. I went through Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases and identified those common to investing.

Anchoring – the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
This is like dating a girl who is hot, crazy, rude and kicks puppies. You can keep going back to the fact that she’s hot, but is that going to un-slash your tires? No. Look at the whole package.

If you’re researching a stock that pays a 10% dividend, tread carefully my friend. Don’t salivate at that “guaranteed” 10% return because it may be a mirage (a.k.a. dividend trap). Look at the payout ratio (the percentage of earnings a company pays out in dividends) to make sure they can keep up the dividend. Look for a history of steady dividend increases. Make sure the company didn’t just hire Homer Simpson. Don’t fixate on that 10% yield.

Hindsight bias – filtering memory of past events through present knowledge, so that those events look more predictable than they actually were; also known as the “I-knew-it-all-along effect.”

What’s that? You knew that technology stocks were going to crash in 2000? No, Miss Cleo, you didn’t. If you did you would’ve shorted eBioDigiUnderwearDotCom stock and you’d be in Fiji right now wearing lobster and eating diamonds. Investors have a tendency to remember their past thoughts through a historical filter in which they know the final result, biasing what they recall. The only true test is if their current beliefs, as denoted by actual monetary investments, are correct going forward.

Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
These people are a hallmark audience of online stock message boards. A common mistake of new investors is to buy a relatively un-researched stock for a quick short-term pop, which fails to materialize, whereupon the person trawls for company information online to justify holding it for long-term investment. Any forum post by 123Sexxi4U is taken seriously if they’ve mentioned the stock in a positive light, and warning signs such as bad fundamentals are ignored. To do effective research you must take both positive and negative factors seriously. Besides, 123Sexxi4U is probably this guy:

Authority bias – the tendency to value an ambiguous stimulus according to the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic.

This is the reason that market pundits have jobs. Financial news outlets may report that markets rose because the Fed lowered rates (making it cheaper for companies to acquire capital) or raised rates (signaling a strong economy and fear of inflation). See the problem? That newscast or blog post was written by a person who has written thousands of similar stories in the past and who just wants to get home by 5:00 to watch his kid play Tee Ball. Take the advice of financial authorities with a large grain of salt.

^ How great was Tee Ball?

Disregard of regression toward the mean – the tendency to expect extreme performance to continue.
There’s an old scam in which a man receives a letter in the mail advising him to watch a certain volatile stock for the next week. The stock shoots up 15% and the man receives another letter telling him a second stock is going to fall in the following week. That stock falls 20%. This goes on for eight weeks, with each pick turning out to be absurdly profitable. By the end, the man is convinced of the validity of the service and pays thousands of dollars for weekly stock picks, which turn out to be a bust and the man loses his home and car. Also he gets the flu.

What happened? The scammers bought 256,000 addresses and mailed 256,000 letters, half of which said to buy a certain volatile stock the following week and half of which advised to sell it. The 128,000 receiving incorrect forecasts never got a letter again, and the 128,000 people receiving correct first-week results would get another letter, half of which said to buy a second stock and half to sell. After eight weeks, there were 1,000 “lucky” people who had gotten incredibly accurate picks in the mail and who couldn’t wait to buy the worthless future picks.

There was nothing special about these 1,000 in comparison to the other 255,000, and no reason to think that they would be that lucky in the future. Past performance doesn’t guarantee them future results – their returns will revert to the mean.

This is a common mistake when reviewing mutual funds. Kiplinger’s usually lists mutual funds by sector and then ranks them according to how well they’ve done in the past year. The top funds look enticing, but remember that those rankings have virtually no bearing on future results and both the best- and worst-performing funds will probably revert to the mean for their sector.

Escalation of commitment – the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong

The year is 2000 and you’ve just purchased some Enron stock, which is turning out to be as good an investment as an XFL franchise.

From Wikipedia,

In August 2000, Enron’s stock price hit its highest value of $90. At this point Enron executives, who possessed the inside information on the hidden losses, began to sell their stock. At the same time, the general public and Enron’s investors were told to buy the stock. Executives told the investors that the stock would continue to climb until it reached possibly the $130 to $140 range, while secretly unloading their shares.

And you know what? Individual investors continued to purchase stock as it fell. Lesson #1 is that Enron executive were assholes. Lesson #2 is cut your losses. It’s easy to rationalize this sort of doubling-down as dollar cost averaging, which reduces the average cost-per-share. However, while this is almost always a good idea when investing in the market as a whole, it is almost always a bad idea when increasing your investment in a single stock.

Normalcy bias – the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before

I’m looking at you, 2008 Wall Street. You were correct at the time – up until then, house prices had never fallen in recorded history. Banks and investment firms hung their hat on that fact and made outrageous home loans that the occupant could never pay, believing that they would be bailed out by rising home prices. I have on good authorityi.e., I made it up that at one point they accidentally financed a $4.5 million home in the Hamptons to the Geico gecko.

We all know how that story turned out. A small correction in the housing market set off a spiraling series of foreclosures and short sales. Just because something has never happened doesn’t mean it cannot happen. See Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s excellent book “The Black Swan” for more info on the fat tails of probability distribution. (Not to be confused with Natalie Portman’s movie.)

Clustering illusion – the tendency to see patterns where actually none exist.

There’s a school of thought which relies on stock charts to predict future prices (called technical analysis) which is particularly susceptible to this illusion. I honestly don’t know whether it works or not, but keep in mind that humans can find patterns in absolutely anything, from spins of a roulette wheel to star constellations on the sky. Be careful.

You may be reading this smirking at all those dumb investors wandering around with the wool pulled over their eyes. If so, you’ve fallen for the bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people.

Enough of all this negativity. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re either more intelligent than the average investor, or you’re bored and wasting time at work. Either way, congratulations.

The economics phrase, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” is so often-quoted that it has its own Wikipedia page. It also happens to be false.

There is a free lunch on Wall Street and it’s called diversification. Let’s take a fictional basket of 5 random stocks and a second basket of 500 stocks. According to the efficient market theory, their expected future returns will be equal to each other, and to the market as a whole.This is somewhat of an oversimplification and ignores such factors as industry and asset classification, but bear with me. However, due to the smaller sample size, the standard deviation of the returns from the first portfolio will be much higher than that of the second.I should mention that owning a large number of stocks does not, in and of itself, guarantee diversification. Imagine if you owned BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobile, etc.

You’ve already learned in my article “When the average isn’t the average” that high-volatility returns are the natural enemy of the intelligent investor, much like a balanced political viewpoint is the enemy of Bill O’Reilly.

^ Is to rational commentary what beef-a-roni is to fine dining

In other words, since our basket of 500 stocks will have the same expected return as the basket of 5 stocks, with a smaller standard deviationThere is a calculation for this ratio called the “Sharpe Ratio”, which measures the excess return (or risk premium) per unit of risk in an investment asset or a trading strategy, over the long term it is virtually guaranteed to outperform its smaller counterpart. (There are small additional transaction costs to such a strategy, which can be largely eliminated by buying ETFs or index-tracking mutual funds.)

There’s a reason for the saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. If diversification were an NFL team, it would go 36-0 and win the Super Bowl and date Alessandra Ambrosio and cure cancer with cold fusion and record a platinum album. I think you get my point.

The time value of money is one of the most fundamental and important ideas in economics, so I figured it would be worth a short article explaining the concept.

A simple way to rephrase it is like this, “people would rather receive money now than receive the same amount of money in the future.” (It’s not a difficult concept, just an important one.) Future money is not worth as much as present-day money – we would rather get $100 today than $100 a year from now. To offset this preference, we can assign money an interest rate, where $100 today may be worth $103 or $105 or $110 in a year.

The really fun part comes when we realize that different people have different interest rate preferences. This is one of the basic concepts of capitalism. Some people have capital now and wish to invest it, other people need capital now and wish to borrow it. Joe Plumber might want to borrow money to buy a house today, so we’ll assign him a higher interest rate: $100 today is worth a lot to him, say, $106 a year from now. His personal interest rate is 6%. On the other side of the tracks, Prepster McCashBastard has extra trust fund payouts which he wishes to invest safely, so he will give up $100 today in order to have $102 a year from now: his personal interest rate is 2%.Banks, of course, operate as a middleman on both sides of this transaction – they borrow from Prepster at 2% and lend it to Joe at 6%. Pretty good deal.

Whenever there is a difference in interest rates between people or companies, present-day capital will flow from the lower interest rate to the higher interest rate, where it is valued more highly. This is as reliable a phenomenon as water flowing downhill, or Andy Rooney making absolutely no sense whatsoever.

^ Has been yelling at the kids on his lawnthey’re plastic gnomes since 1963, when John Wilkes Booth was president and the world was still black-and-white.

As a Finance major, much of my curriculum in school consisted of various ways of calculating the Net Present Value (NPV) of a future series of cash flows. This sounds complicated but simply entails discounting a future cash flow based on a given interest rate.

You can do it yourself in Excel. Type “=PV(0.06,1,100)” to see what $100 a year from now is worth to you today if your interest rate is 6%. Hint: it’s $94.34. Congratulations, you now have a Finance degree from Florida State.

With this nifty new information, we can do such interesting things as calculate the value of a winning lottery ticket. Lotteries in the United States usually offer the winner the choice of receiving an annuity (a fancy word for a series of payments) or a lump sum. The advertised “jackpot” amount refers to the sum of the annuity payments, in other words, a $20 million jackpot may pay out $1 million per year for 20 years. This is no chump change, but, as you learned above, it is worth much less than receiving all $20 million today. Let’s assume your personal interest rate is 6%Remember that this is the rate you discount future monies at – the higher the interest rate, the more you value money now rather than later.. Type this in Excel: “=PV(0.06,20,1000000)”. The result tells us that this particular series of payments is equivalent to receiving about $11.5 million today.

We can also approach this problem from the opposite side. What if, as an alternative to the 20-year annuity, the lottery offered you a lump sum of $9 million today? What interest rate does that imply? We can type in “=RATE(20,1000000,-9000000)” and discover that $9 million today is worth exactly the same as our million-per-year-for-20-years annuity at an interest rate of 9.20%. If your personal interest rate is higher than that, you should take the $9 million today. If it’s lower than that, take the annuity.

“Sam”, I’m sure you’re saying right now, “thank you for enlightening me on this important concept”. Trust me, it was my pleasure. I’m happy to do it, because my parents raised me as a gentleman. And a bear. My parents also raised me as a bear.