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Your company mirrors your personality
Founder personality
A founder with trust issues will probably come across to coworkers as a micromanager. A founder who has trouble committing will come across as absent-minded. A kind founder is likely to build a kind culture.
Money and behavior
Money works the same way. Getting wealthy through investing is far less about strategy and far more about behavior, and a person's own poor behavior is what leads to poor financial results. Personal finance is more personal than it is finance.
Habits as personality
Investing habits can be read as human nature habits too. Someone with excessive turnover in their stocks may struggle to keep steady relationships. Someone with a strong home bias, loading up on stocks from their own country, has quite a low likelihood of having moved away from their hometown.
Does trading too much really hurt returns?
Economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean studied tens of thousands of household accounts at a large discount broker from 1991 to 1996. The households that traded most earned about 11.4 percent a year, while the market returned about 17.9 percent. Trading costs and poorly timed trades accounted for the gap. Their paper was titled Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth.
Do fund managers also invest close to home?
Economists Joshua Coval and Tobias Moskowitz found in a 1999 study that American mutual fund managers tilted their portfolios toward companies headquartered near them. The local stocks tended to earn higher returns than similar distant ones, which suggests the managers were using nearby information. Home bias therefore reflects both comfort with familiar places and access to local knowledge. The study covered US funds.
How does a founder's personality shape a company?
Sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe proposed in 1965 that organizations carry the mark of the time and conditions in which they were founded. Later researchers extended the idea to founders themselves. Studies of startups have found that the founder's values often shape hiring, rules, and everyday behavior for years. The first employees tend to copy what the founder does.
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