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If we’ve been doing our job as your fiduciary advisor, you might already be able to guess what our take is on current market news: Unless your personal goals have changed, stay the course according to your personal plan.

Have you caught cryptocurrency fever, or are you at least wondering what it’s all about? Odds are, you hadn’t even heard the term until recently. Now, it seems as if everybody and their cousin are getting in on it.

Thinking about prepaying some of your 2018 state taxes in advance of limitations imposed by the Republican tax plan?

Well, forget about it.

It’s hard to believe, but another year is almost behind us. With January just around the corner, now is a great time to review various items you may want to consider as you get set to enter 2018. Many of the IRS publications referenced below are for tax year 2016. Changes are not anticipated when 2017 guides are published.

Tens of millions of Americans are looking forward to the day they retire. Others enjoy their profession and can’t imagine a life without work. Yet, even those folks recognize that one day they won’t wake up on a Monday and head into the office.

In the world of investment management there is an oft-discussed idea that blindfolded monkeys throwing darts at pages of stock listings can select portfolios that will do just as well, if not better, than both the market and the average portfolio constructed by professional money managers. If this is true, why might it be the case?

THE DART BOARD

We’ll wrap our series, the ABCs of Behavioral Biases, by repeating our initial premise: Your own behavioral biases are often the greatest threat to your financial well-being.

We’re coming in for a landing on our alphabetic run-down of behavioral biases. Today, we’ll present the final line-up: sunk cost fallacy and tracking error regret.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

So many financial behavioral biases, so little time! Today, let’s take a few minutes to cover our next batch of biases: overconfidence, pattern recognition and recency.

Overconfidence

There are so many investment-impacting behavioral biases, we could probably identify at least one for nearly every letter in the alphabet. Today, we’ll continue with the most significant ones by looking at: hindsight, loss aversion, mental accounting and outcome bias.

Hindsight