Community discussion: prospects you are not objective about

My non-baseball reading at the moment is The Intelligent Investor, a classic and indispensable examination by Benjamin Graham of how to survive and even prosper as an investor. One of Graham’s key precepts is to understand your own psychology and the psychology of investing in general, with the goal being to keep emotions out of investment decisions, or at least as much as humanly possible.

Stock selection is something like prospect selection if you think about it: with a stock you’re attempting to figure out what that stock will do in the future using a variety of metrics and measures and (if you’re honest with yourself) guesses, just as we do with trying to project the future success of a baseball player.

Keeping your ego out of it is a key to success, or at least knowing when your ego is in the way. That requires self-examination and honesty.

So today let’s turn that microscope on ourselves with three related discussion questions:

****Name some current minor league prospects who you are not objective about or suspect you are not objective about;

****Can you think of examples where lack of objectivity led you astray in player evaluation?

****What methods, if any, do you use to be aware of or adjust for your own bias?