An Economist article, Trader’s Brains: Rogue Hormones,
warns us that rogue traders — those who, caught up in the euphoria of
successful market trading, allow their normally risk-averse stances and
strategies to be overcome — might not be so uncharacteristic of
high-volume, high-value, high-reward traders in general. The research
of Cambridge neuroscientist John Coates
suggests that hormones drive investment decisions to a far greater extent than economists or bank executives realise.This might be somewhat bad news for those of us whose investment stakes and positions, mediated through institutional retirement funds, are measured by a much more modest scale as well, but also — for us Virtue Ethicists — provides an interesting occasion for thinking about the virtue of courage, the vice of foolhardiness, the phenomenon of lack of self-control, and the nature of prudential practical reasoning.
