About this episode

Victor Haghani discusses the Crystal Ball Challenge, an investing experiment that tests decision-making under uncertainty.

In this episode of The Smarter Planner Podcast, host Belle Osvath, CFP®, welcomes back Victor Haghani, founder of Elm Wealth, co-author of The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions, and former co-founder of Long-Term Capital Management. Victor returns to the podcast to discuss his latest investing experiment, the Crystal Ball Challenge, a unique exercise designed to test whether having access to tomorrow's news would actually make investors better decision-makers. Inspired by a challenge posed by Nassim Taleb, the Crystal Ball Challenge gives participants access to a future Wall Street Journal front page while hiding the actual market results. Players then decide how to position stocks and bonds before discovering what really happened. What sounds like an investing superpower quickly becomes a lesson in uncertainty, confidence, and risk management. Victor also explains why some artificial intelligence models were surprisingly effective at identifying market direction while still struggling with one of investing's most important skills: determining how much risk to take. Throughout the conversation, Belle and Victor explore a challenge every financial planner…

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