Many thanks for your thoughtful comments! In conducting research for this piece, I was fascinated to learn how psychology research has shown that intuition figures quite prominently in our decision making. Our unconscious is far more capable of reasoning out optimal choices than most of us believe. In my piece, I cite some of my favorite experiments I came across in my reading, which show how people improve decision making by using their intuitive gut feelings rather than deliberate thinking (the literature typically calls this “affect”). One particularly fun read is, “Should I Go with My Gut? Investigating the Benefits of Emotion-Focused Decision Making” by Mikels, Maglio, Reed, and Kaplowitz. The authors conduct various “live” experiments with results showing that our properly trained unconscious meaningfully enhances the quality of our decisions. I look forward to reading the book you suggested by Crawford for more on this topic.

I find your comments regarding how “financial emotional intelligence” plays into the CFA Program and investing success very interesting. You make some valid points. Having said that, I would put it slightly differently. While, as you suggest, the CFA Program doesn’t provide all the answers for investing, I suggest that its primary role is to provide a solid foundation for serious investment professionals to build upon. I suggest that it’s very effective in that regard. Without such a foundation, when making investment decisions, we would all be relegated to “rules of thumb and folklore” as our dear friend Peter Bernstein used to say. The CFA Program thus gives us a professional method and approach to investing and decision making that properly guides us toward investment success and can be used for judging the quality of ideas, even those coming from our subconscious.

If not already done so, you might also consider a recent, related FAJ Ed Corner, "The Art of the Better Forecast [https://www.cfapubs.org/doi/full/10.2469/faj.v66.n6.2]."

Thanks again for your insightful comments!