Taller people, especially among men, earn more than their shorter colleagues, says Andrew Leigh, an economist at the Australian National University. Being six feet tall raises annual income by almost $1,000, compared with men two inches shorter, he maintains.

This may be because tall people in today's society have greater self-esteem and social confidence than shorter people, researchers suggest.

The biggest link between height and salary seems to appear in sales and marketing positions — careers in which customer perception generally has a major impact on success.

Height can also be a predictor of how individuals choose to manage their money, says University of Texas professor Alok Kumar. 

In fact, the effect of height on our financial decisions is second only to actual wealth, Kumar suggests: "It is known that wealthier people will hold riskier assets and take more chances. Some have thought that after wealth, age or education would be the next-best predictor. Height, however, beats all of those."

There's some evidence that the stock market's performance is tied to the time of year and even the days of a month.

But, as the leaves change, you may actually want to pay more attention to your own seasonal clock, says U of T finance professor Lisa Kramer.

People with seasonal affective disorder (SAD) tend to stick to safer investments in the fall and winter when days are growing shorter but take bigger risks with their money in summer, she believes.

SAD is a disorder that causes varying degrees of depression due to reduced levels of daylight; it affects about 15 per cent of Canadians, to varying degrees.

The stock market's gyrations over the past few days have spooked even the most savvy investors but those who run for the hills at this point will likely regret it, maintains Burton Malkiel, author of the popular "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" and now a Princeton economics prof.

"Investors who have sold out their stocks at times when there have been very large declines in the market have invariably been wrong. We have abundant evidence that the average investor tends to put money into the market at or near the top and tends to sell out during periods of extreme decline and volatility," Malkiel wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

Good advice but tough to do when many believe a mean, old bear has been unleashed. Nonetheless, investors should stay the course, Malkiel advises.

Sunday night at Fenway Park, as the Boston Red Sox wrestled first place in the AL East from the New York Yankees, sat Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man.

Plopped in Sox owner John Henry’s private box in a white golf shirt, he looked every bit like a man worth nearly $25 billion more than Warren Buffett should: tanned, relaxed, enjoying the finer, but still modest, points of American culture.

Of course, for Slim, with such a vast fortune – estimated at $74 billion earlier this year by Forbes – comes wild fluctuations in worth.

Like, losing $8 billion, and likely more, in the span of about a week.

The last few weeks in the Canadian market have been difficult ones and you can’t be certain as to
what’s in store in the near future. In the mean time, investors are being told to resist the temptation to pull the trigger.

Trying to control your portfolio in response to world events provides a short-term illusion of sound decision-making, but may come at a long-term cost, warns David Crowder, a consultant at Russell Investments.  

It’s important to understand that it's changes in your life, often made by choice, that have a far greater impact on your wealth than any collection of current events.

There’s lots of evidence to suggest that most of us have innate irrational biases that lead to poor decision-making. Worse still, in times of crisis the reasoning part of our brain actually shuts down a bit, increasing our likelihood of making poor decisions.

“There is nothing more emotional and irrational than the relationship people have with their money,” Frank Murtha, head of Market Psych, told a group of advisors last week in Toronto.

Fear and greed, always at odds, are the two strongest emotions at play in investing, says Murtha whose firm often works with advisors to help them incorporate investor psychology concepts into their businesses.

“Fear crushes greed; it’s not a fair fight because the pain of loss and its emotional imprint is two-and-a-half times greater than the joy of any gain,” Murtha explains.

Finding an advisor is often a hit-and-miss process driven by word-of-mouth referrals. It's not easy to sort through the alphabet soup of credentials and find an advisor who fits your needs.

That’s why Brightscope, which offers online performance measurement tools for 401(k) and other pension plans in the U.S., recently launched a free service to help people research and shop for financial advisors.

BrightScope Advisor Pages pulls together a variety of public data that most consumers would have trouble finding into a single view, and allows users to search and compare advisors based on qualifications, amount and types of assets under management and area of specialty.

It also lets you see red flags such as legal disputes, customer complaints and regulator actions as well.

BrightScope says its aim isn't to punish unscrupulous advisers. The company hopes that once its directory pages become more popular, advisors will embrace them as a marketing tool and upload extras such as pictures, information about their practices and perhaps even performance data.

Casinos use lots of tricks – free booze, flashing lights and sounds, a mazelike design and using chips or electronic credits instead of cash – to inspire us to take risks with our money. 

It’s also no accident that casinos are open 24/7, that no one ever knows what time it is and that high rollers are encouraged to stay up all night long.

But most of all, they want us awake ... not alert, it seems, but awake. 

That’s because, according to a new paper out of Duke University, when it comes to evaluating the risks of winning or losing money, sleep-deprived individuals don't think straight and, aside from being grumpy and irritable, tend to be much more optimistic than their well-rested counterparts.

Talking about averages can be tricky.

In every part of the country, you can find a statistic for average annual rainfall. The nation’s capital, for instance, receives an average of 70 centimetres per year. But this statistic can be very misleading.

Consider for a moment that on just one extremely rainy night in September of 2004, more than 135 millimetres of rain fell in Ottawa, skewing the numbers accordingly.

Clearly, the average annual rainfall figure isn’t always accurate. The bottom line: An average of any kind has little meaning if you don’t know the standard deviation, or variability, of the numbers that comprise the average.

Remember the scene in “Jurassic Park” where the guy who was so sure a T-Rex couldn’t see him if he held still ends up getting eaten? Later in the book, some naïf asks what killed the man. The wry answer: “He was misinformed.”

I’ll say.

When it comes to investing, misinformation can be very costly and it comes in many forms, including phony business rumours to spur stock activity, bogus quotes attributed to public figures, vengeful flames against companies from disgruntled customers or employees, and so on.

And sometimes the problem lies in commonly held beliefs that simply don’t hold water even though they’re repeated frequently, particularly when markets get choppy, writes Brent Arends in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.