Why Investors Take Bigger Risks With Profits Than With Principal

Imagine this scenario: You buy a stock, it rises sharply, and suddenly the gain feels like ‘extra money’ (example for illustrative purposes only). Using that profit for a riskier bet might feel easier than touching your original savings. This tendency is known as the house money effect.

Table of contents

• Why this happens
• Where behavioural finance fits in
• Why it could matter
• Guardrails that might help
• The takeaway

Why this happens

One reason is mental accounting. Even though all money is the same in value (a rupee is a rupee), we often treat it differently depending on where it came from. Original savings may be viewed as “untouchable,” while profits may be mentally labelled as “winnings” and may feel less valuable. This separation could make investors more willing to risk profits than principal.

Another explanation comes from how people think about gains and losses. If an investment has delivered a positive return, the pain of potentially giving up part of that profit may feel smaller than the risk of losing the initial capital. That shift in perspective might nudge investors into making riskier choices.

Where behavioural finance fits in

This is a classic case studied in behavioural finance—the field that looks at how psychology and social influences shape financial decisions. Behavioural finance shows that people don’t always act like the rational investors described in theory. Instead, emotions, biases, and framing often influence decisions. The house-money effect is one example of how past outcomes may affect risk-taking behaviour.

It’s useful to compare this with another well-known tendency: the disposition effect, where investors tend to sell winners too soon and hold losers too long. While the disposition effect makes people cautious with gains, the house-money effect can have the opposite effect—encouraging more risk after a win. Both can appear in different contexts, sometimes even in the same investor.

Read Also: Behavioral Finance: Meaning, Types, and Its Importance

Why it could matter

If left unchecked, the house-money effect may lead to:

• Taking bigger risks than intended: For example, rolling profits into highly speculative stocks without the same diligence as before.
• Over-concentration: Allowing one successful position to grow disproportionately large compared with the rest of a portfolio.
• Chasing momentum: Jumping into riskier bets after some profitable investments, fuelled more by confidence than by fundamentals.

Of course, not every decision to increase risk after a gain is a mistake. Sometimes the fundamentals genuinely support further investment. The key is to be aware that recent profits might colour how risks are perceived.

Guardrails that might help

• Treat all money the same: Remind yourself that profits are just as real as principal.
• Set position limits in advance: Decide the maximum size of any single investment before profits cloud judgment.
• Rebalance regularly: Trimming winners back to target weights may help control risk.
• Pause before reinvesting gains: A short cooling-off period might help avoid impulse trades.
• Use a checklist: Ask questions like “Would I make this decision if I hadn’t just made a profit?”

Read Also: Impact of Behavioural Finance on Market Conditions

The takeaway

The house-money effect highlights how our minds may treat gains differently from principal, nudging us toward bigger risks after success. Behavioural finance helps explain why these patterns occur, but awareness is the first step to managing them. By putting some simple rules in place, investors might avoid letting short-term wins turn into unintended long-term risks.

At Bajaj Finserv AMC, we recognise that emotions are the cornerstone of investor behaviour – not just for investors but for investment professionals too. That’s why, behavioural finance is at the heart of our investment philosophy, InQuBe, which combines the Information Edge, Quantitative Edge and Behavioural Edge. By understanding, tracking and monitoring market sentiments and our own investment biases, we seek to make mindful and strategic investment decisions. Get the Behavioural edge by investing with Bajaj Finserv AMC. Read more about InQuBe here.

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