One of the biggest problems in personal finance is a phenomenon that behavioral economists call hyperbolic temporal discounting, which is basically a fancy term for our tendency to sacrifice the future to live for today.

FORBES: How an Avatar Can Make Us Richer

As my mother put it, I had a tendency sometimes to act a bit casual about my future. (Laughter.) Sometimes I was rebellious.

WHITEHOUSE: The White House

However, nowhere is the tendency to extend trends in a straight line into the future without expectations of reversals more prevalent than in the world of investing.

FORBES: Long-Term Forecasts Are Mostly Worthless

This suggests that, rather than pushing companies to explore some new area which the government in its wisdom or folly has decided is the sector of the future, industrial policy should encourage competition instead, thus reducing firms' tendency to seek out less contested arenas.

ECONOMIST: Economics focus

The latest quirk to be examined is momentum, or the tendency for stocks that did well in the past to do well in the future.

ECONOMIST: The strange existence of market anomalies