Behavioral Finance

Behavioral Finance course overview

Behavioral finance is the study of the influence of psychology on the behavior of financial practitioners. In the course, you will learn about the wide range of decision making biases and information processing errors that influence our financial decision making.

We’ll start the course with what behavioral finance is and how it impacts on financial markets. We will then explore the most common self-deception biases, cognitive biases, and emotional biases. We will discuss their causes and potential measures you can take to manage them. We’ll finish the course by discussing loss aversion and the herding bias.

Learning objectives

Upon completing this course, you will be able to:

• Understand what behavioral finance is, how it differs from modern finance, and how it impacts on financial markets
• Describe the most common self-deception biases, their causes, and potential measures you can take to prevent them
• Understand cognitive biases and explore their root causes with real life examples
• List the most common emotional biases and discuss their causes with examples
• Understand loss aversion and other biases that contribute to its effect
• Study the herding bias and other social factors that distort decision-making

Behavioral Finance is an elective course of CFI’s CMSA® program

CFI’s Capital Markets & Securities Analyst (CMSA)® program covers all the basic, intermediate, and advanced topics about sales and trading, investment banking, and asset management. This program teaches you trading strategies used in the finance and capital markets industry. It is ideal for students who want to learn how to trade different asset classes. The program is completely online so you can take it at your own pace, from anywhere in the world.

Common career paths for students who take the CMSA® are Sales & Trading, Asset Management, Wealth Management, Treasury, Risk Management, and other capital markets careers.

Who should take this CMSA® course?

This Behavioral Finance course is perfect for anyone who wants to be well rounded in their analysis. This course is designed to equip anyone who desires to begin a career in fixed income, equity, sales and trading, or other areas of finance.