Follow this link to the article on The Boston Globe’s web page.

How cognitive fluency shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel.

This little teaser is more realistic than the phony one with which they start the article:

Imagine that your stockbroker – or the friend who’s always giving you stock tips – called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce.

This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.

I do not know, yet, how this will influence the way this blog is written.

As Nicholas Taleb said in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, people are on much firmer ground when they describe an observation than when they try to explain the reason for it.  The explanations in this article about  why certain behavior might occur look more like confabulation to me than the actual reasons.  So read the article for the description of the phenomena themselves and file the explanations of the reasons for the phenomena in the little round file.

The discussion of picking stocks might be better worded as follows:

If you were going to pick a few stocks for your portfolio by random selection instead of by traditional measures of quality, you would be better off if you at least chose the stocks that were easier to pronounce.  Of course you would be a fool to pick stocks this way.