When markets bounce on ceasefire optimism, a well-documented psychological mechanism pushes investors toward a mistake they will regret the moment the next headline arrives.

Gold stayed near $4,500 Tuesday while Canadian miners shed 2% to 6%. The divergence is not a market anomaly. It is the availability heuristic doing what it always does: overwriting the correct frame with the most recent one.

Canada's April CPI came in below the worst fears. History is clear on what retail investors do next, and it is rarely right.

Eleven weeks of elevated crude has recalibrated what investors call "normal." The research on anchoring explains why that shift is dangerous — and why the most costly portfolio decisions of 2026 are still ahead.

Markets are selling off this morning not because anything went wrong in Beijing — but because nothing went spectacularly right. That distinction matters enormously for investors, and most of them will not make it.

Two consecutive data surprises are triggering a well-documented cognitive pattern. Here is what the research shows about how investors process sequential bad news, and why the worst decisions tend to follow the clearest-seeming signals.

Markets recovered from the Iran war shock weeks ago. A measurable cohort of retail investors never came back. The research explains why — and what it costs them.

When dramatic, vivid events dominate the news, the availability heuristic causes investors to overweight recent and visible risks and underweight gradual, probabilistic ones. The Hormuz crisis is producing exactly this pattern, and the portfolio decisions it is generating are systematically predictable.

When geopolitical shocks dominate the news cycle, the availability heuristic inflates perceived risk and drives selling at exactly the wrong moment. Six weeks into the equity recovery, the divergence between investor sentiment and market reality has never been clearer.

The vivid imagery of a closed strait, $110 oil, and 30% higher gas prices has activated a well-documented cognitive bias. Kahneman and Tversky's availability heuristic is producing exactly the portfolio distortions advisors should expect, and address.

Oil is dropping 3-4% on Iran peace hopes and equity futures are rising. History says this is the moment investors make their worst moves.

Five trading days, four narratives. Iran escalation Monday, Tehran's ceasefire rejection Tuesday, the surprise ceasefire Wednesday, oil collapsing below $95, and a Canadian jobs rebound this morning

The market's biggest single-day surge in months followed a ceasefire that still hasn't actually opened the Strait of Hormuz. The psychology of relief is one of the most well-documented sources of inve

Trump has set an 8 PM ET deadline tonight for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on its power plants and bridges -- the third deadline he has issued and extended since the conflict be

One year ago today, the S&P 500 had already fallen 10% from Liberation Day's announcement, and investors were panic-selling into one of the fastest market drops in decades

The ceasefire hope-and-disappointment cycle has now repeated three times since the Iran war began on February 28: oil fell on March 23 when Trump suggested talks, surged on March 27 when they failed,