The Mind of Wall Street

Leon Levy co-founded Oppenheimer and then Odyssey Partners, and this memoir written with Eugene Linden covers a career from the early 1950s through the dot-com collapse. Levy was a value investor with an unusual interest in psychology and in the psychoanalytic understanding of markets.

His stated approach combines conventional value analysis with attention to what he calls the market's mood, meaning the collective psychological state that determines which facts investors are willing to see. He argues that valuation tells you what something is worth and psychology tells you when the market will agree, and that a value investor who ignores the second will be right and unpaid for years. He describes his own practice of watching for the moments when a widely accepted assumption becomes so entrenched that it stops being examined.

The book covers specific episodes: the 1970s bear market, the Mexican debt crisis, the leveraged buyout period during which Odyssey participated, the 1987 crash, and the technology bubble, which Levy was publicly sceptical about. He also discusses his interest in psychoanalysis and in archaeology.

The reference has not verified all the specific claims about individual positions, which come from a memoir written near the end of a long career. The book has no system and readers looking for a method will not find one. Its value is the sustained argument that market psychology is analysable rather than mysterious, and a first-hand account of five decades of cycles.