Behavioural Investing: A Practitioners Guide to Applying Behavioural Finance (Wiley Finance) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"It is quite simply the best and most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date."  (Financial Times, Monday 3rd December 2007)

"The Year's most exhaustive, and often entertaining, coverage of the behavioural literature."  (Financial Times, Saturday 15th December 2007)

"...one of the few 'must read' books on the topic of investing."  (The Herald - Glasgow, Saturday 2nd February 2008)

"…a fantastic insight into how markets operate… [and] one of the few "must read" on the topic of investing." (The Herald, Sat 2nd February 2008)

Product Description

Behavioural investing seeks to bridge the gap between psychology and investing. All too many investors are unaware of the mental pitfalls that await them. Even once we are aware of our biases, we must recognise that knowledge does not equal behaviour. The solution lies is designing and adopting an investment process that is at least partially robust to behavioural decision-making errors.

Behavioural Investing: A Practitioner’s Guide to Applying Behavioural Finance explores the biases we face, the way in which they show up in the investment process, and urges readers to adopt an empirically based sceptical approach to investing. This book is unique in combining insights from the field of applied psychology with a through understanding of the investment problem. The content is practitioner focused throughout and will be essential reading for any investment professional looking to improve their investing behaviour to maximise returns. Key features include: 

• The only book to cover the applications of behavioural finance
• An executive summary for every chapter with key points highlighted at the chapter start
• Information on the key behavioural biases of professional investors, including The seven sins of fund management, Investment myth busting, and The Tao of investing
• Practical examples showing how using a psychologically inspired model can improve on standard, common practice valuation tools
• Written by an internationally renowned expert in the field of behavioural finance

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 728 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; illustrated edition edition (November 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470516704
• ISBN-13: 978-0470516706
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #296,386 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing and entertaining, December 30, 2007

By	Olivier Clementin (Paris France) - See all my reviews

This book is a collection of short notes about psychology, investment strategy and finance. Some chapters are original, but most of them were written as Equity Strategy weeklies for clients of James Montier's then employer (Dresdner Kleinwort Benson). I had already read a few of them, including the famous one about happiness and money, which everyone in the market has read, and which I preciously retain for consultation on the gloomy days when my portfolio loses more than 1%. The notes are unedited and presented thematically, not chronologically, which is sometimes confusing. There is some repetition between chapters, and several chapters assume prior knowledge not exposed in the book, which makes the discourse not very user friendly at times. You need to have some experience of investment to benefit fully from it.

Overall the book is well written: clear, clever, entertaining and unpretentious, as is appropriate from a broker writing to clients - unlike, for instance, the unsufferably arrogant tone of Nassim Taleb, who writes on similar subjects and who, incidentally, is favorably mentioned in this book. Both Montier and Taleb define themselves as skeptical empiricists (or was that empirical skeptics ?) It reads rather quickly despite the number of pages: each chapter is preceded by a caption and a summary, which means that everything is repeated three times, and charts and graphs take up a lot of space. The book covers a lot of ground in psychology, investment process, investment strategy and ethics, including commentary on the latest research in those fields and extensive quotations from the 30s, notably from "the Masters" Keynes and Ben Graham. However, it is not really "a practitioner's guide to applying behavioural finance" since Montier's (sound) investment advice is not really based on psychology. The last parts, on ethics and happiness, are particularly original in an investment context. A higly recommended alternative to Taleb's forgettable Black Swan.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the solid, no nonsense investment books, July 24, 2008

By	Cem Kurdoglu "Crash" (Geneva, Suisse) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Mostly a compilation of the writer's research papers, written for an investment bank. Well, that's ok, but most of them are not edited for the book, just inserted into the book as they are. This brings a lot of repetitions and some references to papers, that you don't have access to. At least those papers could have been inserted as well. But we have to give the full credit to the writer even as this book as it is, it is a book of comprehensive research and full of insight regarding the psychology of the investing public. It also gives the reader a glimpse of all previous investment research. One of the good solid investment books.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A collection of newsletters, November 17, 2008

By	Jackal (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This is a collection of the author's newsletters to institutional clients. I'm sure they are quite interesting to read if you get them in real-time, but here you have the best of them collected in a thick volume.

This format is not ideal. The notes contain useful information and ideas but are very disconnected. The author actually states that one can just open the book anywhere and read one note. This is true, but then I would argue for reading good blogs instead. They are in real-time and all the links are fresh.

Having said this the notes contain some useful ideas so I've still given the book three stars.

I have written several short reviews on trading books. The best way is to compare the score on the books I've read. Many reviews on amazon.com are just glorious 5 star reviews. I use all five categories; sorry but everything isn't "great". Books rated 5 are very good. Books rated 4 are good solid books well worth reading. Books rated 3 can be bought by some people who read a lot or have very specific needs. Books rated 1 or 2 I would not recommend buying or reading. Naturally all in my humble opinion.