Market Insanity

Book excerpt: Market Insanity: A Brief Guide to Diagnosing the Madness in the Stock Market is an engaging and accessible primer which applies modern behavioral finance to equity markets. It helps readers understand how logical investment decisions can be betrayed by what Taillard calls "the insanity," all those behavioral quirks which cause us to achieve less than optimal utility. The book describes how limited information, habit, the rules of the game, asymmetric information and ego blend together in potentially toxic ways in market environments, thus creating bubbles, stock runs, and more prosaically, even 'normal' equity prices. In addition, the book discusses the implications of these behaviors in-depth. In so doing, it helps the reader to not only predict the madness within equity markets, but also helps them develop solutions that address and mitigate outcomes. - Provides detailed and accurate descriptions of the most relevant behavioral anomalies for finance - Entertainingly written by a veteran consultant with 15+ years experience helping companies explain anomalous finance behavior in non-economic language - Shows how educated finance professionals can use behavioral insights to help build finance solutions - Addresses the implications for equity markets in deviations from rationality paradigms - Draws on a vast range of literature in explaining anomalous behavior, including economic psychology, economic psychology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology and animal behavior