HDQ Behavioural Desk

Behavioural Desk

The Herd Has Found Its New Favourite Trade

Canadian bank shares and gold miners moved in opposite directions this week, and the reasoning has more to do with which headline landed most recently than with either sector's fundamentals.

Aug 21, 2026 6 min Read →

Behavioural

Chasing Tuesday's Ten Percent Gold Miner Gains Is the Costliest Trade This Week

Agnico Eagle, Wheaton Precious Metals and Barrick surged as much as 10.5 percent while Canada's five largest banks fell in tandem, and the psychology behind that instinct to chase it deserves more scrutiny than the headline number.

Aug 20 6 min Read →

Behavioural

The Certainty Effect Is Doing the Heavy Lifting in This Morning's Tariff Relief Rally

Trump paused Section 338 tariffs three hours before the deadline. The market is pricing it as resolved. It isn't.

Aug 19 6 min Read →

Recent — Behavioural

Behavioural The TSX's First Real Pullback in Weeks Is Testing the Disposition Effect, Not the Rally

Monday's decline was 0.17%. The instinct it triggers in clients sitting on a year of record gains is not nearly so small.

Aug 18 6 min

Behavioural Four Hormuz Dips Recovered in a Month. Today Tests Whether the Pattern Holds.

Investors have learned that Strait of Hormuz headlines are buying opportunities. The mechanism that produced that lesson just changed.

Aug 17 5 min

Behavioural Gold Miners Sold the News on a Record TSX Session

A well telegraphed inflation print produced exactly the pattern behavioural finance predicts, and the biggest single mover of the day was a decline.

Aug 14 6 min

Behavioural Overconfidence Is the Real Cost of a Four Session Record Streak

The TSX has closed at a record high in four of its last five sessions. The research on what that streak does to investor judgment should worry advisors more than the milestone excites clients.

Aug 13 6 min

Behavioural Franco-Nevada Beat on Almost Everything. The Market Will Only Remember One Number.

Record first half results and gold ounces sold up 23 percent were not enough to offset a miss on a single consensus figure, the same pattern that hit Barrick two sessions earlier.

Aug 12 6 min

Behavioural Barrick's Quarter Beat Guidance on Almost Every Metric. The Stock Fell Anyway

A two cent earnings miss overshadowed 50 percent earnings growth, a production beat and a deal that clears the path to an IPO.

Aug 11 6 min

Behavioural Gold's Record Week Made the Story Feel Settled. Monday Already Disagrees.

Friday's gold and oil decoupling was real. Assuming it holds without the Hormuz deal actually closing is the availability heuristic at work.

Aug 10 6 min

Behavioural Oil Swung 11% One Way and 3.7% Back in a Single Week, and the Reason Is a 1973 Paper About How Memory Works

WTI's whipsaw between Hormuz deal headlines and tanker incident headlines is the availability heuristic playing out in real time, and it is not settling anything for clients trying to read the trend.

Aug 7 6 min

Behavioural Shopify Beat Growth Estimates in May and Fell 16 Percent. It Beat Them Again in August and Rose 17.

The revenue growth rate barely moved between the two quarters. What moved was which AI story investors were telling themselves that week.

Aug 6 6 min

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