Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich

Written by Jason Zweig

Narrated by Walter Dixon

What happens inside our brains when we think about money? Quite a lot, actually, and some of it isn't good for our financial health. In Your Money and Your Brain, Jason Zweig explains why smart people make stupid financial decisions-and what they can do to avoid these mistakes. Zweig, a veteran financial journalist, draws on the latest research in neuroeconomics, a fascinating new discipline that combines psychology, neuroscience, and economics to better understand financial decision making. He shows why we often misunderstand risk and why we tend to be overconfident about our investment decisions. Your Money and Your Brain offers some radical new insights into investing and shows investors how to take control of the battlefield between reason and emotion.

Your Money and Your Brain is as entertaining as it is enlightening. In the course of his research, Zweig visited leading neuroscience laboratories and subjected himself to numerous experiments. He blends anecdotes from these experiences with stories about investing mistakes, including confessions of stupidity from some highly successful people. Then he draws lessons and offers original practical steps that investors can take to make wiser decisions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jan 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781541444652

Jason Zweig

Jason Zweig is an award-winning financial journalist whose writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Money magazine, Time, CNN, and much more. He is the author of several finance books, including Your Money and Your Brain and The Devil’s Financial Dictionary. He has a BA from Columbia College, where he was awarded a John Jay National Scholarship. He also spent a year studying Middle Eastern history and culture at the Hebrew University in Israel. He lives in New York City. Find out more at JasonZweig.com.

Reviews for Your Money and Your Brain

[tee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Make me understand better about emotions that could effect portfolio performance. Great book!

[Sean Atukorala · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Awesome book about behavioral psychology and life in general! The author really goes out of his way to make his points clear.

[tulsatv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Zweig presents neuroscience-based reasons for our seemingly irrational behavior in the realm of investing. We are adapted for more basic modes of surviving. But if you can take this info to heart, you may be able to work around the built-in biases and reactions.

[pointedpundit · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Controlling one’s emotions is a major key to successful money management. No one who has withered under the emotional pressure of making split second investment decision will argue that it is not.Financial writer Jason Zweig combining concepts in neuroscience, economics and psychology to explain how our biology drives us toward good or bad investment decisions. He argues our brains lead us to self-deception. We are oath to admit our lack of financial knowledge. We overestimate our ability to perform. We believe we're smart enough to forecast the future even when we have been explicitly told that it is unpredictable. Our impetuousness leads to mistakes of action rather than inaction. In short, although we see ourselves as rational beings; we make irrational investment decisions. His book blends tales from his visits to neuroscience labs with stories of investing mistakes. From them he pulls lessons and counsel on how investors can make more profitable investment decisions. They are:1.Take a global view.2.Hope for the best: expect the worst.3.Investigate; then invest.4.Never say always.5.Know what you do not know.6.Past is not prologue.7.Weigh what they say.8.If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.9.Costs are killer.10.Eggs go splat.Another that should be added to the list is Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice. More general in its approach, it cites many of the same studies. Schwartz, a Swarthmore College professor, cited research from psychologists, economists, market researchers and decision scientists to make five counter-intuitive arguments: We would be better off if we: 1.Voluntarily constrained our freedom of choice.2.Sought "good enough" instead of "the best."3.Lowered our expectations about decision's results. 4.Made nonreversible decisions. 5.Paid less attention to what others around us do.Thoroughly researched, Your Money and Your Brain needs to be studied by anyone seeking to make wiser and more profitable investment decisions.