Losing €50 hurts twice as much as winning it

Try this: I offer you a coin flip. Heads, you win €150; tails, you lose €100. Mathematically it's a good bet — and yet most people say no. To accept, many demand a potential win of roughly double what they're risking.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky gave it a name and a number: loss aversion. Losing hurts about twice as much as winning the same amount feels good.

That asymmetry runs entire portfolios: we cling to sunken stocks so we 'don't lock in the loss', sell our winners too early, and leave savings parked for years out of fear while inflation quietly trims them without asking.

Your brain protects you so hard from losing all at once that it sometimes condemns you to losing bit by bit. Knowing the bias doesn't switch it off — but it lets you see it coming.