Reading the Markets Insights from Financial Literature

In 2014 Daniel Crosby, a psychologist and asset manager, co-authored the bestselling Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management and followed that up in 2016 with The Laws of Wealth. Another two years and he’s produced a new book: The Behavioral Investor (Harriman House, 2018). His “admittedly audacious” goal is for this book “to be the most comprehensive guide to the psychology of asset management ever written.” I’m not sure that he has succeeded in this task, though perhaps my hesitation comes from having read far too many books on behavioral finance and having mashed them all together in my mind. But even if he has fallen short of his own self-defined goal, he has written a sweeping account of the impediments that human beings have to overcome to become successful investors. He also points investors to a “third way” of investing, distinct from both the passive and the active approaches.