The Anxious Investor
Mastering the Mental Game of Investing
Ratings1
Average rating4
15
Mastering the Mental Game of Investing
Ratings1
Average rating4
A revelatory new guide to becoming a smarter investor, drawing upon behavioral psychology, economic modeling, and market history to offer practical advice for reaching your financial goals "With the equity and fixed-income markets off to a rough start in 2022, investors might do well to review the lessons shared in Mr. Nations’s book." —Wall Street Journal The human brain is ill-suited to making wise investment decisions. We are overconfident in our own knowledge and hunches, terrible at assessing risk, and prone to chasing financial thrills rather than measured long-term goals. Making matters worse, periods of severe market turbulence—whether the dotcom bubble of the late 90’s, the Great Recession a decade later, or the brief, vertiginous COVID crash of 2020—bring out our most irrational selves, at the exact moment when the consequences for investment mistakes are most severe. Scott Nations has spent his career studying market volatility. His firm, Nations Indexes, is the world’s leading independent developer of volatility and option-enhanced indexes. In The Anxious Investor, he teaches readers how to understand markets, master their own fear, and make the most of their money. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in behavioral psychology, Nations shows that the secrets to excellent investing lie in mastering the quirks of human psychology. How are some investors able to make prudent decisions under pressure, while others rely on gut instinct to disastrous effect? How can we prepare for a market crash before it happens? And what can help us stay the course when the waters get choppy? Using the stories of three infamous market bubbles as his backdrop, Nations offers readers history’s hard-earned lessons about greed, volatility, and value. Whether you’re saving for retirement, a home, or a child’s college education, The Anxious Investor offers a blueprint for achieving your goals. While we can never know exactly which financial surprises may loom ahead, here is an indispensable resource for investors to make sense of them.
Reviews with the most likes.
Speaking as an avid finance reader, you are not going to find anything that is ground breaking. In fact, given the title, I expected more of a psychological take on the mind games that happen while investing. While the book did offer this to some extent (different heuristics) if felt that it was sorely lacking in terms of personality and how direct experiences could have shaped our decision making. Rather, it was focused on the pitfalls of the most notable stock market experiences that entire cohorts faced.
The majority of the book is more focused on the history of the stock market and bubbles. While these are important and are crafted fairly well, I think that it misses the mark for those that purchased this book on title alone. There was not enough discussion about global diversification, monte carlo simulations, or tax optimization.
Advice (And what you will find in most books of this nature) Invest in low cost well diversified index funds).
