What have you actually learned about behaviour and duty?

You started with the biases that quietly drain a portfolio; you finish able to name the duties that arrive the moment the money belongs to someone else, and to see how tightly the two halves are connected.

The four movements, in one breath

• Biases that cost money. Losses hurt about twice as much as equal gains feel good, which produces the disposition effect — winners sold early, losers held forever — and hands your decisions to a purchase price the market has never seen. Overconfidence turns into overtrading, and roughly 1% a year of friction turns €387,000 into €321,000 over twenty years. Recency makes the last three years feel like the next thirty; anchoring hands your judgement to whichever number arrived first. Herding is the one heuristic that inverts in markets, because the copying creates the evidence — and joining late means most of your money arrives at the worst prices.
• The behaviour gap. Confirmation bias makes weak research feel thorough, curable only by kill criteria written before you need them and a decision journal written at the time. Then the measurement: a fund can be up 20% while its investors are down 16%, because money arrives after the good year. How large the gap is in the real world is genuinely disputed — the widely quoted one-to-two-points-a-year has been challenged in the peer-reviewed literature, which re-estimated it at about a tenth of a point — but the direction holds, and nobody invoices you for it either way. Written rules with tolerance bands beat willpower, because they are decisions made while you were calm.
• Duty: fiduciary vs suitability. Fiduciary duty rests on loyalty (client first, no competing motive) and care (the diligence of a prudent professional), and it judges process, not outcome. Suitability is a floor — "does this fit?" Best interest is a ceiling — "compared with what, and would my answer change if my pay didn't?" The share-class case shows the gap in money: about €85,000 on €200,000 over twenty years, with every box ticked. And "suitable" is never a property of a product — it lives in the client file, in capacity, horizon, liquidity and concentration. Duties attach to relationships and roles, and the loudest voice in the room is often not the client.
• Conflicts, disclosure and conduct. Conflicts are structural, not moral: read any fee model by asking what behaviour it pays for. The response hierarchy is avoid, mitigate, disclose — in that order, because disclosure transfers information, not responsibility, and can even make advice worse. Professional codes converge on about ten principles, of which the hardest in practice are independence and market integrity — and the everyday safeguard is a contemporaneous file note plus one question: would I be comfortable seeing this printed with my name on it?

The one sentence to keep

If you remember nothing else: the same weaknesses that cost you money privately become breaches of duty publicly — so the fix in both halves is identical, and it is a decision made in advance, in writing, before you have any reason to want a different answer.

The non-negotiable framing

Everything here is education, not advice. The portfolios, fees and clients were illustrations chosen to make arithmetic visible; none of them is a recommendation, and none of them is you. And on the ethics half specifically: this has been educational content about how professional standards generally work — not legal or compliance advice. Duties, terminology and thresholds vary substantially by jurisdiction, by regulator, by licence and by the kind of service being provided. The obligations that actually bind you are the ones written in your own rulebook, and where the stakes are real, that is where the answer comes from.

Before you sit it

Each of these is a minute at your desk. Any one that is not names the lesson to reopen first.

• Say roughly how much more a loss hurts than an equal gain, and name the selling behaviour that follows — Why does a loss hurt more than the same-sized gain feels good?
• Explain in one sentence why an investor earns less than the fund they held — Why do investors earn less than the funds they own?
• Give one recommendation that is suitable and still not in the client's best interest — How is "suitable" a lower bar than "best interest"?
• Name two places a conflict of interest hides inside a fee structure — Where do conflicts of interest hide in a fee structure?

Try it now

1. From memory, name the six biases from Units 1 and 2, and the single number that measures their combined cost in your own account.
2. Write your one-page policy — target weights, bands, position caps, cooling-off period, kill criteria — and date it. Then run the five-line bias audit on your own records and note the two most expensive leaks.
3. Open one fund you own and read its expense ratio — the Terminal link below opens a fund's record (it starts on SPY; change the symbol) — then look for a cheaper share class with the same mandate in the provider's own fund documents, and answer the unit-4 question in one sentence: who is paid by whom, and for what behaviour? One fund's record is below.

Open SPY.US — fundamentals in the EODHD Terminal

4. Say the course's closing line out loud: "My biases are a private cost until the money is someone else's — then they are a breach. So I decide in advance, in writing, and I keep the file." Then take the checkpoint quiz.

A note on what we do here. EODHD Academy teaches how markets, portfolios and professional standards work, using real market data as a laboratory. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything, and nothing here is legal, tax or compliance advice. The point of this course is not to make you cautious — it is to make your decisions deliberate, and to make the reasons for them written down.