Behavioural Edge and Market Psychology

A speculator modelled on Jesse Livermore learns to read and trade the market.

Why Wall Street grows rich on fees while its clients' results stay ordinary.

Markets as a game of crowd psychology, seen through 1960s go-go Wall Street.

Flow, the state of full absorption in a hard task, and how to find it more often.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

Second-level thinking on risk and cycles, with notes by Klarman and Greenblatt.

Performing under pressure by quieting the self-interference that spoils play.

Chronic stress and how it affects the quality of decisions.

A value investor's memoir from the 1950s to the dot-com crash, on market psychology.

Beyond a point, more options make people less likely to choose and less satisfied.

Neuroscience of investing decisions, written by Graham's modern editor.

Value investing joined with behavioural finance, from a strategist's research notes.

How testosterone feeds traders' winning streaks and appetite for risk.

The habit loop of cue, routine and reward, and how to change a habit by its routine.

How behavioural economics was built against economists who assumed rational agents.

Twenty short essays on why behaviour matters more than knowledge with money.

Common investing mistakes catalogued by a working asset manager

Data showing that low-expectation stocks beat popular ones over the long run.

Behavioural finance for practitioners: mental shortcuts, framing and market errors.

A mathematician's own losses used to explain market probability errors

Practical countermeasures rather than a catalogue of biases.

Spier on the psychology and habits behind durable value investing.

Incerto volume 4

Why money is hard to think about, and the errors people make in spending.

Why people mistake luck for skill, above all in markets.

A six-week programme to automate banking, credit, saving and investing.

Experiments from psychology showing the systematic errors in how people reason.

Klontz and Klontz introduced the concept of money scripts — inherited, often unconscious beliefs about money formed in childhood — and this book is the clearest account of the four script types: money avoidance, money worship, money status, and money vigilance. The clinical case material grounds the theory in ways that purely empirical books don't.

Tavris and Aronson focus on what happens after a bias fires: the self-justification, narrative revision, and escalating commitment that follow. Cognitive dissonance, they argue, is not a personality flaw but a universal mechanism, and understanding it explains police misconduct, political tribalism, and therapy failures in a single framework.

Kahneman died 27 March 2024; this was his last book.

Nudge: The Final Edition published 2021.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

Experiments showing that people depart from rational choice in repeatable ways.

Mullainathan and Shafir's research on cognitive bandwidth shows that financial scarcity — not just poverty but any experience of not having enough — tunnels attention in ways that make long-term planning harder and short-term mistakes more likely. It reframes willpower-based explanations of financial failure without excusing the structural causes.

Daniel Gilbert's accessible account of affective forecasting — our poor ability to predict what will make us happy. His research on immune neglect and focalism is less cited than Kahneman's work but equally well-evidenced.

Experiments showing most cheating is many people cheating a little.

Sketches of the gap between what people know to do with money and what they do.

Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.

Hanson and Simler make the most provocative claim in this list: that self-deception is not a flaw but an adaptive strategy — we hide our real motives from ourselves so we can more convincingly hide them from others. If true, the entire bias-correction project has a ceiling. This book belongs at the end so it reframes everything before it.

Michael Lewis's account of the Kahneman-Tversky collaboration works as intellectual biography and as a second path through the research for readers who find academic writing slow. The friendship and its eventual fracture clarifies how two very different minds produced work that neither could have done alone.

One mental bias per chapter, the research behind it and how people fall for it.

A nine-step programme that counts spending in hours of life energy.

Edited volume.

Life as speculation, with lessons on markets, games, careers and relationships.

Why standard finance models understate market risk, from fractal geometry's creator.

Edited volume.

Applies behavioural finance to building portfolios for real clients.

Classifies investors into behavioural types for advice and design.