The VIX sits near the quiet end of its yearly range, yet the TSX closed October 8 at 4.9% below its August high. Research on reference points explains why the second number drives behaviour.

The 30-year Treasury yield rose 38 basis points from September 22 to October 7, the slowest kind of loss for investors to register. Behavioural research explains why the TSX decline on October 7 may be the day many Canadian clients start paying attention.

Three oil swings larger than 7% since September 10 produced smaller VIX moves than the first one. Habituation, not calm, may explain the gap between a closed strait and a 15.01 volatility reading.

Loss aversion, the availability heuristic and myopic loss aversion all point at the same problem: a slow drift below a remembered high does more behavioural damage than a headline.

The VIX closed at 16.39, 5.4 points below its 25-year October average, while the 10-year Treasury yield touched its highest level since 2002.

The TSX Composite closed September 2.85% below its August 31 level and 1.09% above its June 30 level, the ninth straight quarterly gain. Behavioural research explains why the shorter window tends to win the emotional argument.

Protection against a stock decline is near a one-year low while Treasury yields sit at a two-decade high, a pairing that probability weighting and the availability heuristic help explain.

Gold dropped 3.5% on a day when Middle East headlines worsened, and the gap between the safe-haven label and the price is a live test of mental accounting and loss aversion.

University of Michigan sentiment fell to a four-month low in September while the TSX Composite gained 19 percent over the same year, a divergence behavioural finance traces to which information stays most vivid in memory.

Wednesday brought the sharpest single session decline in three months. The pattern behind client anxiety this week has a name, and it is not the index level.

The volatility index closed near 15 on Wednesday even as the TSX reversed a 326 point Tuesday gain into a 402 point drop, and loss aversion research explains why the quiet headline number is the wrong signal for what clients are feeling.

Kahneman and Tversky documented why a two-year cutting narrative does not release its grip just because the Federal Reserve reversed it.

AAII bearish sentiment hit a sixteen-month high the same week the VIX eased back toward its own average. The gap is a live case study in availability bias.

The Federal Reserve delivered a quarter-point increase that its own projections had signalled for weeks, yet markets reacted as though it were a surprise.

VIX sits in the mid-teens as Strait of Hormuz strikes continue and the Federal Reserve prepares its first rate increase since 2023, a gap behavioural finance has a name for.

The CBOE Volatility Index spiked after the Saudi pipeline strike and retreated within a single session, even as WTI crude kept climbing. The anchoring effect behind that gap is worth naming before the next escalation arrives.