Opinion: These mind hacks can help you handle a volatile stock market and invest smarter

Behavioral finance is sometimes mistakenly seen as a vehicle for ridding investors of their pesky emotions and irrational quirks en route to them becoming something like the Homo Economicus that economists long imagined them to be. If we could just rid ourselves of irrationality, the thought goes, we would make perfect financial decisions. The only problem is, sometimes behavior that is irrational in the strictest sense of the word can greatly aid our quest to reach our financial goals. Being a behavioral investor is less about adhering to some textbook notion of rationality and more about understanding and bending the idiosyncrasies of human nature to our advantage.