雅思阅读 90: The Psychology of Market Fever（市场狂热的心理学）

改编自 Journal of Behavioral Finance / Atlantis Press（2024年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://docker.atlantis-press.com/article/125986780.pdf

Reading Passage

A. Every generation produces a bubble it swears is different. The Dutch tulip speculators of the 1630s paid the price of a townhouse for a single bulb. The railway mania of 1840s Britain financed lines that no freight would ever use. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s valued companies with no revenue at billions, on the strength of a name containing the letter "e" and a dot-com suffix. In each case, after the fact, the participants look foolish. At the time, however, they felt like geniuses — and they had company. Stock market bubbles are not, by and large, the work of a few isolated madmen. They are collective phenomena, in which millions of ordinary people, most of them intelligent and well informed, end up buying an asset at a price that future history records as absurd. Behavioural finance, the branch of economics that takes human psychology seriously rather than assuming rationality, has spent three decades explaining how that happens. Its answer is not that people are stupid. It is that several well-documented mental habits, each useful in everyday life, combine in markets to produce the very opposite of wisdom.

B. The first of these habits is herding. When people cannot judge an asset's value on their own, they treat the buying and selling of others as information. If neighbours, colleagues and taxi drivers are all making money in technology shares, it feels rational to infer that they know something you do not. The economist John Maynard Keynes compared professional investing to a beauty contest in which the task is not to judge the prettiest face but to guess which face the crowd will find prettiest — and everyone else is trying to do the same. Scharfstein and Stein, in a famous 1990 paper, added a career-based explanation: a fund manager who loses money alone looks incompetent, while a manager who loses money alongside everyone else looks merely unlucky. Reputation, in other words, pushes professional investors to follow the crowd even when their own analysis tells them the crowd is wrong. By the time the average investor reads about the bubble in the newspaper, the professional buyers have already positioned themselves inside it.

C. Two further biases reinforce the herd. The first is overconfidence. Study after study shows that most people believe themselves to be above-average drivers, above-average investors and above-average forecasters of markets — a statistical impossibility. Overconfident investors trade too often, hold too little cash, and underestimate the probability that the story they have just heard will not pan out. The second is the availability heuristic: people judge how likely an event is by how easily examples of it come to mind. During a rising market, every conversation includes a story of a friend who doubled his money; the stories of people who lost everything are absent, because they are not at parties talking about it. The recent, the vivid and the successful dominate attention, and the investor concludes that prices will rise forever because every available example says they will. The longer the boom continues, the more available the success stories become, and the more the cautious investor feels like a fool for missing out.

D. The price then takes on a life of its own. Once a stock has doubled, investors anchor to the new price — "it has already gone up two hundred per cent, it must be worth it" — and dismiss contrary evidence through confirmation bias, the habit of reading only the articles that agree with us. Narrative bias supplies a story that ties the price to a grand transformation: the internet, artificial intelligence, a new economy, the old rules no longer apply. The greater fool theory completes the logic: the investor does not need to believe the asset is worth its price, only to believe that someone else will pay more tomorrow. Hyman Minsky, whose financial instability hypothesis became famous after the 2008 crisis, described the mechanical end point. Long periods of stability make lenders and borrowers alike complacent; risk is taken on under the assumption that it will always be refinanced; eventually the debt structure cannot be rolled over, prices stop rising, and the first sell-off triggers the very thing the herd had forgotten could happen. The "Minsky moment" is the point at which the beauty contest ends and everyone suddenly notices that the emperor has no clothes.

E. What can an individual investor actually do with this? The behavioural literature is not, on the whole, encouraging about cures. Investors who are told about overconfidence often become more confident, in the belief that they will be the exception. The more useful advice is structural rather than psychological: automate saving, rebalance on a fixed schedule, ignore financial media during rallies, and remember that the same brain that reads this paragraph is the one that will want to buy at the top. Regulators, for their part, have learned that bubbles cannot be cleanly prevented by persuasion; they can only be managed after they burst, by clearing the worst debt and containing the panic. The deeper lesson is not that markets are irrational but that rationality, in a social species, is fragile. An investor standing alone, looking at a price that has doubled for six months in a row, is outnumbered by every conversation he has. The psychology of market fever is not a list of errors to be corrected. It is a description of how a crowd of reasonable people, each trying to avoid being the last one out, ends up paying more for less than any of them would, on a quiet morning, have believed possible. The best protection, the literature suggests, is not superior analysis but a smaller stage: trade less, rebalance on a schedule, and remember that the neighbour who tells you about his profits is almost certainly omitting the losses he cannot bring himself to mention.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. Why investors copy one another ii. Two further biases that feed the boom iii. How price momentum and narrative complete the bubble iv. What the research implies for individual investors v. The history of the Dutch tulip trade vi. Why central banks should raise interest rates vii. How fund managers are paid by their employers

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. According to Keynes, professional investing resembles a beauty contest because investors A. choose the face they find genuinely prettiest. B. try to guess which choice the crowd will make. C. are rewarded by judges for good looks. D. refuse to discuss their choices with others.

6. Why do fund managers follow the crowd, according to Scharfstein and Stein? A. They are paid more for underperforming the market. B. Losing alongside everyone else looks better than losing alone. C. They have no access to financial data. D. They are legally required to follow the index.

7. What is the "availability heuristic"? A. The tendency to judge likelihood by how easily examples come to mind. B. The habit of buying only assets that are readily available. C. The rule that investors must keep a certain amount of cash. D. The belief that prices will fall because they have risen.

8. What is a "Minsky moment"? A. The start of a long boom in which everyone makes money. B. The point at which unsustainable debt triggers a collapse. C. A central bank announcement that prevents a crash. D. The day a new initial public offering is launched.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Behavioural finance assumes that market participants are perfectly rational.
10. Most people believe they are better than average at driving and investing.
11. The greater fool theory assumes an investor must always believe an asset is worth its current price.
12. Telling investors about overconfidence usually makes them less confident.
13. Central banks have successfully abolished stock market bubbles.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Long periods of market (14) __________ encourage excessive risk-taking until the debt structure becomes unsustainable and a (15) __________ moment triggers a sell-off.

答案与解析

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