Finance for Normal People: How Investors and Markets Behave

I enjoyed this book very much. It is very entertaining: Statman has a gift both for memorable examples and for expressing things clearly. And it is very educational: I am much more knowledgeable now about why I do things (and relieved to understand myself better).In particular, I like the explanation of why much of my behaviour is sensible ("normal") even though it falls outside of old-fashioned financial economics. Normal people make decisions not only because things we buy or invest in are financially useful; we also like to feel good emotionally, and to convey an image to others. All three motivations are sensible, but financial economics accepts only the first motivation, because it assumes (wrongly) that we're all purely rational, unemotional people. Once you accept (as I definitely do!) the emotional motivations, it changes our understanding of how the world works.That doesn't mean that everything we do is "normal". Statman explains that we can be normal-knowledgeable, normal-ignorant or even normal-wrong. He gives hundreds of illustrations. For example, we ought to find out financial facts, so that we know how much of the value of something we pay for is utilitarian and how much we're paying for the emotional and expressive benefits that might come attached. The more we understand our own behaviour, the more we can avoid what he calls "cognitive errors" (where we leap to a conclusion that's wrong) -- again, many examples. And since our assessments of costs and benefits vary from person to person, understanding why we want something helps us to make a cost-benefit trade-off that works for us, even if it might not work for others.As someone who has been involved with capital markets for most of my career, thinking that I understood both theory and practice, I found his explanation of the difference between price-equals-intrinsic-value markets and hard-to-beat markets clear, and the explanation of who beats a hard-to-beat market, instructive and convincing. (Typical insight from Statman: "In other words, markets may be crazy, but this does not make you a psychiatrist.")I'll stop there. The list of my learnings would be long. But basically, all of this has been, for me, not just educational but also reassuring and energizing.

Dr. Meir Statman is one of the fathers of "behavioral finance." He has pioneered and developed the field of behavioral finance during the past three decades. "Finance for Normal People" is the latest book of Dr. Statman that presents a comprehensive introduction about the current state of "behavioral finance." It is written in plain English and very easy to follow. The text comes with many real world examples to deliver the concepts to readers even without a strong background in finance. Part one of the book helps readers to understand the wants and constraints of normal investors and Part two introduces behavioral portfolio theory, behavioral life cycle theory, and behavioral asset pricing. I covered a number of chapters in my behavioral finance course for Master’s students and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from students regarding the usefulness of the book. Many students commented that the knowledge they learned from the book is useful for daily life decisions about and beyond personal finance and investing. The book is accompanied with an instructor manual and a student manual, both of which contain many interesting materials and websites that are current and relevant. Regardless of whether you are looking for a casual reading about behavioral finance or a formal understanding of the field, this book is a great starting point. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding herself as a human who wishes to make better financial decisions under cognitive and emotional constraints. College educators who wish to use a good behavioral finance book should also consider this book seriously.

This is an excellent book, well written and full of information and fresh insights for all investors and investment professionals. Several chapters struck special cords with me as president and CEO of Wealthfront, an automated investing service. Statman is one of our advisors.Chapter 9 emphasizes the benefits of automatic saving and investing so people can focus on the things that really matter to them. Chapter 7 addresses the cognitive and emotional obstacles to realizing losses despite their tax benefits, and the benefits of automating loss realization to maximize long-term investment returns.And Chapter 11 addresses market efficiency, emphasizing the dangers of jumping from observation that markets are not price-equal-value efficient to the conclusion that they are easy to beat. Statman writes: “Hard-to-beat markets are not impossible to beat. Investors with exclusively available information find it easy to beat the market, and investors with narrowly available information find it hard but not impossible to beat the market. Yet, on average, investors with nothing more than widely available information find it impossible to beat the market. Such investors are beaten by the market more often than they beat it. Indeed, investors with exclusively available and narrowly available information gain their market beating returns by emptying the pockets of investors who attempt to beat the market with widely available information alone.”

Going beyond the rational behavior, the books makes one dive deep into expressive and emotional reasons of how normal people behave when making investment decision.An amazing book!