📖Joel Greenblatt
Crowd Behavior Awareness
Act when the crowd is at emotional extremes.
Understanding crowd psychology is essential. When everyone agrees, the opportunity has usually passed. The best time to act is when the crowd is most fearful or most confident.
🏠 Everyday Analogy
📖 Core Interpretation
Joel Greenblatt highlights that many investment mistakes are psychological, not analytical. Managing behavior under stress is as important as finding ideas.
💎 Key Insight：Crowd consensus signals exhausted opportunities.
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❓ Why It Matters
In volatile markets, fear and greed push investors to buy high and sell low. A behavioral framework reduces avoidable, self-inflicted errors.
🎯 How to Practice
Pre-write decision rules, slow down trades during stress, and separate market emotion from business facts before adjusting positions.
⚠️ Common Pitfalls
Following crowd emotion at extremes
Mistaking confidence for certainty
Forcing trades to quickly recover losses
📚 Case Studies
1
Holding Through the Financial Crisis (2008)
An investor following Greenblatt’s Magic Formula held a diversified portfolio as the 2008 crisis caused steep declines across value names.
✨ Outcome：By holding and rebalancing annually instead of selling in panic, the portfolio recovered and outperformed the S&P 500 over the following years.
2
Magic Formula Small-Cap Portfolio (2012)
An investor built a 20–30 stock portfolio of high-ROC, cheap small caps per Greenblatt’s method, then suffered early underperformance and volatility.
✨ Outcome：Maintaining the rules-based portfolio for several years led to strong excess returns versus the market, illustrating the payoff of disciplined holding and rebalancing.
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