A player who made a layup was no more likely to shoot from distance than a player who just missed a layup. Layups are easy and shouldn’t give the player a strong sense of being hot. But a player is much more likely to try a long shot after a three-point basket than after a three-point miss. In other words, the hot hand might “cancel itself out”—players, believing themselves to be hot, get overconfident and take shots they shouldn’t. The nature of the analogous phenomenon in stock investment is left as an exercise for the reader.
