When I entered Wall Street back in 2004, I thought I was adequately prepared to deal with

wealthy people and their sizable assets.

2008, the great recession, the great crash of the stock market, I quickly realized that studying security analysis,

economics, money, banking, stocks, bonds

had not prepared me for what I was seeing.

What I was seeing was highly intelligent,

otherwise rational investors,

calling me up and asking me to do the most insane things,

such as completely liquidate their stock portfolio.

And the reasons and the rationales for doing so were puzzling.

These were CFOs of public companies.

These are people who put together plans, well thought out plans,

as far as growing their wealth into the future.

And I realized I was seeing something that I was not exposed to

in all my years of studying finance.

And then when I looked further, I realized

that my clients were not the only ones. Pretty much across the board, you will find these

idiosyncrasies of investors, these biases, these irrationalities play themselves out during times of stress and turmoil.

So I realized that I have to go back to school and I have to relearn what it means to be a wealth advisor.

And I came across a field of study called behavioral finance, which is absolutely fascinating. And the moment

I was exposed to it, I was literally hooked. It started with a book by Dan Ariely called

Predictably Irrational. I then went on to read books by people like Daniel Kahanaman,

...