Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

As mentioned in one of the course lectures, Jason Zweig the personal finance columnist with The Wall Street Journal once stated: I’ve been a financial journalist since 1987, and nothing I’ve learned about investing has excited me more than the spectacular findings emerging from the study of “neuroeconomics”. Thanks to this newborn field… we can begin to understand what drives investing behaviour not only on the theoretical or practical level, but as a basic biological function”. Please carefully read the paper by Coates, J. M., Gurnell, M., & Rustichini, A. (2009) entitled “Second-to-fourth digit ratio predicts success among high-frequency financial traders” published in one of the leading scientific journals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(2), 623-628. The paper can be downloaded here:

Discuss the advantages and shortcomings of the study. Provide two possible study extensions that can be implemented and explain why they are useful.