A behavioural assessment for investment professionals
How this works
A study of 783 institutional portfolios found that investors added approximately 100 basis points of value through their buy decisions — and gave back 80 basis points on their sell decisions relative to a random sell strategy. The performance gap is not in sourcing ideas. It is in knowing when to exit.
Answer 20 questions honestly — based on how you actually invest, not how you think you should. A few questions have a correct answer. Most do not.
Answer based on your real portfolio decisions over the last 12 months
The assessment takes about 7 minutes
There are no right or wrong answers on the behavioural questions
Your results map to three primary behavioral dimensions — Composure, Impulsivity, and Conviction — each with a specific intervention protocol.
Questions 1–4 of 20
Question 1
Your model for a new position arrives at organic revenue growth of 12–13%. The two sell-side analysts who cover the company are at 9% and 10%. Their work is available to you and your channel checks post-date theirs. You cannot find a specific error in either direction.
In the 24 hours before your IC presentation, without identifying a concrete reason to revise, you adjust your estimate to 11%.
Is that a pattern you would recognise from your own process?
Question 2
At least one position in your current portfolio would not pass the entry criteria you apply to new ideas — and if you received the cash equivalent today, you would allocate it differently.
Question 3
You need to reduce risk. Three positions, all equal size at entry: one up 38%, one flat, one down 19%. You sit down to decide which to cut.
Which do you look at first?
Question 4
A company you are long on misses consensus revenue by 4% and guides down 6% for the next quarter. The stock falls 11% in the pre-market. You have two hours before the market opens.
Which describes your likely approach?
Question 5
You are building a thesis on a company. Over two weeks of diligence you speak with two satisfied customers who describe high switching costs, a former employee who is positive about product quality and culture, and one sell-side analyst who is neutral-to-bearish and identifies a structural risk you had not modelled.
When you write up the investment case, you draw on the first three conversations in detail. The analyst call is summarised in a sentence — noted, but not addressed.
Does that match the pattern of how your diligence tends to distribute?
Question 6
A company in a sector you follow was the subject of a high-profile governance failure. Not a company you owned — but you knew the name, and the press coverage was detailed.
In the three months that followed, when you reviewed risk assessments for other companies in the same sector, you found yourself applying a higher governance discount than your process normally calls for — including to companies with clean track records and no meaningful similarities to the incident.
Is that a pattern you recognise?
Question 7
You are evaluating the same speculative idea under two scenarios. In the first, you would fund it from flat seed capital set aside for exploratory positions. In the second, you would fund it from accumulated gains sitting in a recently closed position. Same idea, same fundamentals, same total portfolio size.
Would your position size or risk tolerance differ between the two scenarios?
Question 8
A position you held fell 30% over six months. The warning signals — order volumes declining, margins compressing in successive reports, management guiding cautiously — were all present in real time.
Would an independent analyst working from the same information, with no position in the stock, have reduced the holding before the full drawdown?
Question 9
Your model has a bear case. When you built it, you took it seriously — it was a realistic downside scenario, not a stress test you wrote to satisfy a template.
By the time you are presenting the position in an IC meeting, you have mentally set the bear case aside. You reference it, but you no longer believe it will play out.
Is that an accurate description of how your bear cases tend to age?
Question 10
A position you have held for 14 months has missed on every material metric you originally modelled — revenue, margins, and management execution. The stock is down 22%. The original structural thesis has not been explicitly disproved, but the evidence of execution risk has accumulated significantly beyond what you expected at entry.
The IC is asking for a recommendation. Which describes you better?
Question 11
You have collected nine of ten stamps on a loyalty card at a café you find unremarkable. A better option has opened nearby.
Do you go back for the tenth stamp?
Question 12
You have at least one position that has been at roughly the same weight for more than two years, with no meaningful trim, add, or deliberate decision to hold at that size. No new investment note has been written on it in that period.
Is that an accurate description of something in your current book?
Question 13
You have built a detailed model — five years of forecasts, multiple sensitivity tables, scenario analysis across eight variables. The work took three days.
When you finished, you were materially more confident in the position than when you started, despite the sensitivity analysis revealing that your terminal value moves by more than 30% across plausible ranges of just two assumptions.
Is that an accurate account of how model-building tends to affect your conviction?
Question 14
You need to reduce exposure by one position. Two are candidates.
The first has been losing for four months. You know you should have trimmed it earlier — and you have already presented it twice in IC. Cutting now makes that visible.
The second is a position you added three months ago that has done nothing since entry. No particular narrative around it.
You cut the first. Part of the reasoning is that cutting it now — however uncomfortable — closes the loop on a decision that has been lingering.
Does that capture how you tend to approach this kind of choice?
Question 15
A surgeon explains your upcoming procedure has a 92% success rate. Later, a colleague frames the same procedure as having an 8% complication rate. The second version stays with you longer — even though both describe the same reality.
Does that match your experience?
Question 16
A position you have held for 12 months generates an updated model fair value 18% above current price — the same gap it showed at entry. The stock has done nothing.
Two things have changed since you built the original model: the company has entered two new markets with uncertain economics, and the core business has shown four consecutive quarters of decelerating growth.
Which describes your update?
Question 17
A private equity firm with a strong track record in industrial services presents a healthcare services roll-up. The thesis — a fragmented sector, buy-and-build, an operational improvement playbook — closely mirrors a transaction they completed successfully four years ago.
Within the first 20 minutes of the presentation, before you have examined the sector-specific unit economics or current market dynamics, you find yourself inclined to participate.
Is that where you tend to land?
Question 18
A position you held rose 65% over 18 months. When you describe it in a team meeting, you lead with the thesis: you identified the margin recovery before consensus, sized it properly, and held through the noise. The fact that the sector re-rated 40% over the same period comes up only in passing, if at all.
When a different position fell 30%, the account you gave was different in character: timing was bad, the macro environment moved against the trade, management changed its guidance unexpectedly.
Is that a fair description of the asymmetry in how you narrate outcomes?
Question 19
A position you have held for two years has rerated significantly. It now trades at a valuation you would never accept as an entry point on a new idea. You have not reduced it — the original thesis still feels intact.
Is that an accurate description of any position you currently hold?
Question 20
Calibration item
Of the 500 companies that were index components of the S&P 500 in January 2000, approximately what percentage remain constituents today?
Select the range you are 90% confident contains the correct figure.
Question 21
You enter an IC meeting as the sole advocate for a position. The discussion is substantive, but two senior members are sceptical. By the end of the meeting you have reduced your recommended position size by 35% — not because any specific argument changed your model, but because the consensus weight felt more defensible.
Does that scenario resemble decisions you have made in committee settings?
Your Investor Bias Profile
Scores reflect patterns across your responses. Treat elevated dimensions as hypotheses worth testing — not diagnoses.
This is a self-report instrument. Scores are relative to your own answer pattern, not normalised against a population sample. Most investors score positively on several dimensions. The question is which ones, and at what intensity.