Investors are concerned about investing in assets with exposure to carbon emissions. However, regulated electric utilities will be a significant beneficiary in a greener world.

Many assume there are two kinds of business decision makers - those who are ethical and those who are not. However, most of us are both.

Trust is the product of two judgements clients make about us - our competence and our benevolence. So trust could, at least partly, be won without being earned. So is it ethical to try?

In the 1990s and 2000s, investors were largely able to ignore the macro picture. But macro forces have reawakened and matter more than ever for portfolios to succeed in meeting client goals in the years ahead.

As the Baby Boomer generation continues to transition to retirement and life expectancies rise, portfolio construction practitioners must ensure retirement solutions meet client goals right to the end of their days.

Practitioner education focuses heavily on developing technical investment skills, often to the detriment of knowledge and skills that enable better engagement and understanding of the most important aspect of any portfolio – the client!

With the individual, business and economic benefits on offer from a more ethical Australia, the business case for change is a sound one. Strengthening ethics is simply a must for a better future.

Self-awareness has been hailed as one of the most important meta-skills of the 21st century. In an investment advice context, both advisers and clients benefit from engaging in activities that promote its development.

Activist short sellers have received increasing attention - and notoriety - in recent years. This paper adopts the lens of narrative economics to reveal useful insights into the dynamics of activist short selling.

Many investment professionals are typically quite skilled at manipulation, so those researching their funds need to protect themselves against manipulation as they conduct their due diligence.

Global financial markets have been reacting to the Covid-19 pandemic since early 2020, providing a unique opportunity for researchers to examine the impact of a global pandemic on uncertainty, investor reactions, and stock prices.

Emotions are an important influence on financial decision-making and investing. These three papers explore how emotional regulation strategies influence decision-making under risk and uncertainty, and the link to financial success.

Investors rely on both their competence and confidence to make investment decisions. The overconfidence effect is sometimes dubbed the "mother of all biases".

These two papers provide useful insights into how investors' attitudes and behaviours evolve over time, and how our beliefs are distorted if we experience positive or negative prior returns.

Even armed with objective probabilities to help decision-making, people often add their own subjective "weights". Two papers explain this "probability weighting" and how it affects investment decisions.

The first generation of behavioural finance described people as "irrational", fooled into cognitive and emotional errors that diminish wealth. The second generation of behavioural finance describes people as "normal" - we use shortcuts and sometimes commit errors on the way to satisfying our wants.

Finology - behavioural FINance and investor psychOLOGY - knowledge and skills substantially enhance practitioners' ability to communicate with clients and manage portfolios more effectively. This Backgrounder seeks to foster a greater understanding of and interest in finology.

Finology is the interesting and unique mix of behavioural finance ("fin") and investor psychology ("ology") as it relates to giving investment advice to individual investors.

Classical economists often incorporated human behaviour into their thinking. But in the 1960s and 1970s, homo economicus - the great rational agent of economic theory - was born. It was not until the 1990s that the link between human behaviour and economics began to be re-established.

Behavioural finance supplements traditional financial and investment theory. Findings in the field of behavioural finance may help advisers, consultants and clients better manage their thoughts, feelings, and actions when investing.