Invest Like the Best: Dan Egan

About Dan: Managing Director of Behavioral Finance and Investing at Betterment

Uses insights from behavioral economics to nudge more adaptive behavior

Design a better dashboard

speed bumps on mobile platform to discourage impulsive trading
‘tax impact preview’; the magnitude seems to be less influential than the outright presence of this speedbump; interesting side note is that this has a larger effect in Census areas known to be Republican
When messaging entire user base, they would sometimes prompt action (ie selling stock) in users who would have done nothing; they learned to send messages to people who were about to commit an action. This improved efficiency of the message by eliminating ‘false positives’
Displaying information which aligns focus with objectives instead of just defaulting to emotionally charged performance metrics or even the red/green triggers we are used to seeing
Recent related WSJ article pointing out the tyranny of what is displayed to you: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-financial-price-of-our-short-attention-spans-1540174321

Designing a system informed by your beliefs when you are rational to pre-empt decisions you might make when emotional

Cranky judges: parole sentences are heavily influenced by time since their last meal. For such important decisions, we need a better system. Doctors’ diagnosis subject to the same effect!
Building custom tailored indices aligned with people’s stated goals

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