Customer Reviews

Behavioural Finance: Insights into Irrational Minds and Markets

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Perhaps it's the author's intent to make the book as concise but informative as possible that it became a highly concentrated dose of investment psychology and empirical stuff not easily digestable for rookies or even veterans without a strong academic background on finance. For example, he had covered in the 28 page first chapter, psychology theories (with source reference, and simple background/statistics info/support) including over-confidence, over-optimissim, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, conservatism bias, anchoring, representativeness heuristic, availability bias, ambiguity aversion, frame dependence/mental accounting, utility theory (dynamic) prospect theory etc. Do you get what I mean?

IMHO, this book can serve as a recap for advanced traders who understand well basic financial concepts including Efficient Market Hypothesis and it's offsprings like CAPM, and can read statistics and essays with ease. For novices, "Beyond Greed and Fear: Understanding Behavioral Finance and the Psychology of Investing" by Hersh Shefrin and "The psychology of Finance by Lars Tvede" should be better choices.

p.s. The conclusions in the end of each chapter are well written, I must add. However, I cant say there are significant correlation between individual chapters.

This book summarizes the findings of numerous behavioral finance pundits. The author starts with a brief review of pertinent psychology and then addresses topics pertaining to asset management, security analysis and corporate finance. The chapters are broken into small capsules to explain study results on specific topics. I found the subject material interesting but would have liked more detail on how to apply the study findings.

This book is jammed packed with lots of information. I'm on my third read of it. It's hard to understand for a novice like myself, but with each subsequent read, I pick up more information. Plus, there's a lenghty bibliography where you can find references to more in-depth research.

For anyone who is a student of finance and wants practical, research proven information, this is the book for you!

I was 100% pleased with my purchase. The book arrived within 3 business days and was in the advertised condition.