MBTI

I recently attended a talk at thomson toastmasters which is conducting a MBTI workshop. For those whom are unfamiliar with MBTI, it is a popular personality test used by companies to screen for the personality profiles for their candidates. It is regarded well enough to be placed into academia although the reliability of its methodology and results is often criticised.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers–Briggs_Type_Indicator

https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test

Personally, I have taken the test and find it to be pretty descriptive of my thinking and behavioral traits. However, the speaker presents a differing point to it. Granted, he is not a professional speaker or an well grounded expert in this particular field, but he provided plenty of food of thought regarding how MBTI should be used.

ESTJ: extraversion (E),
sensing (S), thinking
(T), judgment (J)

INFP: introversion (I), intuition (N), feeling (F), perception (P)

A lot of people focus on the Introvert and extrovert categorisation. Millions of marketing dollars have been pumped to research and analyse the difference between introverts and extroverts, and how one should behave.

The speaker had an unorthodox viewpoint though. Rather than focus on Introvert Vs Extrovert , he instead tried to steer people to focus on the Sensing Vs Intuitive , and Thinking Vs Feeling. People are not a fixed state often of times and the MBTI is a gauge of the line of thought that a person will naturally follow, rather than a determinative way on how one should lead their lives. It is important to use MBTI as a self improvement tool to compensate for one's weakness rather than bragging about how one type is superior to the other.

Being a investment blog, I am not sure if behavioural traits will play a part in propagating bias in my bottom up security selection and portfolio constituents, or a part to play in making biased / irrational security analysis. Currently, I do screening of stocks via specific ratios and industries that I am familiar with, before going into the annual report to make sure the numbers match up and support the story at play.

Introversion, intuition , thinking, judging may have influence in my tenancy to utilise fundamental analysis, quantitative valuation models, ratio analysis, behavioural finance, and long term buy and hold of equities rather than more abstract technical analysis methods. It might be time to review how my investment methodology has evolved so far throughout these 2 years and fine tune the points that are not so well defined. It will be good to do a post to reason out the soundness of my methodology so I will not be affected by irrational fear or greed, or loss aversion when it comes to cutting losses.