I have a confession: I’m a Disney Adult. Yep — it’s true. Maybe it’s a little annoying, but come on…when one company owns Marvel and Star Wars, what’s not to love?
(Fellow Star Wars nerds… remember when Poe Dameron dramatically announced, “Somehow…Palpatine returned”? How great was that!?! Shakespeare himself couldn’t have done it better. That’s just the magic of Disney scriptwriting!)
(If you’re not a fan of Star Wars, then I’m sorry. That was a very obscure reference. Keep reading, I promise it’s not all like this.)
It gets even better; my wife is also a Disney adult. And according to Disney, my daughter — who is only ten — is a Disney 'adult.'
(Apparently you become an “adult” at age nine. Which, let’s be honest, is just Disney’s way of making sure 5th graders aren’t getting kid-ticket pricing. But I digress.)
For the past several years my family has spent Thanksgiving week at Disney World. It’s a blast. And no, it’s really not too crowded. And yes, it actually is the most magical place on Earth.
This past trip, we were on an epic quest: find Sorcerer Mickey.
If you’re not familiar, Sorcerer Mickey is from Disney’s 1940 animated film Fantasia — the one where Mickey enchants some brooms to carry water and, shocker, everything goes terribly wrong.
After a heroic journey, we finally found him. Below is the photographic evidence.
When we got home, my daughter asked what movie Sorcerer Mickey came from. So, without hesitation, my wife and I fired up Disney+ and said, “Ohhh you’re going to LOVE this. It’s a total classic!”
We hit play.
And…................
It was awful.
Like, truly awful.
Fantasia is approximately 2 hours and 5 minutes long, yet somehow manages to feel 10 hours longer than the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. And Sorcerer Mickey? He’s maybe 9 minutes of the whole movie.
The rest is… well… flowers dancing, centaurs flirting, mushrooms bouncing, a real-life conductor lecturing you about classical music, and then for some reason there’s a dramatic dinosaur sequence where a T-Rex slowly murders a Stegosaurus. They even zoom in on the Stegosaurus’s eyes as it takes its final breath! My daughter looked at me like, “Dad… what trauma did you just show me?”
We did a little online research afterwards and — surprise! — Fantasia was a box office flop in 1940. The movie “lost more than the modern equivalent of $15 million and nearly drove the company into bankruptcy.” The company had to re-release it multiple times over decades just to break even.1
And that’s when it hit me…
I was a victim of one of the most common behavioral finance traps: Hindsight Bias.
Because I love Sorcerer Mickey now — and because the character has become iconic over time — my brain just assumed Fantasia must have always been great.
Surely it was a classic from day one. Americans in 1940 must have predicted that this movie would be a huge financial success when it was released.
Except…no.
That’s not how reality works.
That’s how hindsight bias works.
How Hindsight Bias Hurts Investors
Hindsight bias is the tendency to look at past events and think they were far more predictable than they actually were. After the market moves, it’s easy to say, “I knew that was going to happen,” even when we never acted on that belief, or didn’t actually believe it at the time.2
This false sense of foresight can create dangerous overconfidence.
Why It's Risky
1. Excessive Risk-Taking
When investors feel like their current forecast is “obvious,” they load up on oversized positions or abandon diversification entirely — assuming success is guaranteed.
2. Distorted Decision-Making
Hindsight bias leads investors to underestimate uncertainty and ignore how much luck or timing influenced past outcomes.
3. Overreliance on Past Patterns
Markets evolve. What worked before may not work again. Assuming history repeats itself can be an expensive mistake.
The Takeaway
Just because Sorcerer Mickey is iconic today doesn’t mean anyone could have predicted it when Fantasia first came out. And in investing, that same hindsight can trick us into believing past outcomes were obvious all along.
If you’re ready to make decisions based on strategy instead of nostalgia, let’s talk. Your future portfolio will thank you.
All investing to subject to risk.
Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated
1 - Gabler, Neal. “Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ Was Initially a Critical and Box-Office Failure,” Nov. 2015. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/disney-fantasia-critical-box-office-failure-180956963/
2 - Larry Berman, CMT, “Belief Preservation Bias. 2024.”