Your Money and Your Brain, Jason Zweig

Published by Souvenir Press

Buy it now from Blackwell Books

Subconscious triggers that control investment behaviour

Who’d have thought it – neuroscience can make you a more successful investor!

This fascinating, though not always easy, book attempts to explain the weirdness of the stock market and those who invest in it from the standpoint of evolutionary biology and psychology.

Apparently, our human proclivity for finding patterns even when none exist causes us awful problems as we try to predict what is coming next for our stocks. Equally, rationality and emotion, wrongly mixed, can be disastrous.

With the help of brain scans and interviews with scientists at the forefront of neurological research, Mr Zweig shows why we over-estimate gains and minimise possible losses as we decide how to build our portfolios. )At the same time I found he opens up some interesting possibilities that have nothing at all to do with investing.)

So if you want to know why you keep taking profits too early and hang on to crashing stocks too long or you’d like to learn how being happy can make you richer I suggest invest (geddit?) in a copy soon. Your bank balance may appreciate (sorry!) as you “become a smarter more successful investor the neuroscience way.”