I have produced twenty books/DVDs and three academic papers on finance and social-mood theory. I also write a monthly publication on markets titled The Elliott Wave Theorist. For a bio, visit robertprechter.com. My recommended titles convey financial markets’ nonrational nature in a visceral way. If you understand that feature, if you feel it, you will have a fighting chance to succeed at investing.
This book replaces economic theories of financial market behavior, with their core reliance upon the mechanistic stimulus-and-response model borrowed from physics, and replaces them with the hypothesis that financial markets reflect changes in optimism and pessimism deriving from naturally occurring waves of social mood.
This is one of my favorite books because rather than observing the follies of others, this author details his own. Reading it is like watching a tragedy when you already know the well-meaning protagonist is going to die.
The author chose to remain anonymous for obvious reasons: He thought he was a rare fool. But getting wiped out happens all the time, to many people. If you want to experience vicariously a dangerous thrill ride that you may or may not already have taken, this is your ticket. The book is out of print and hard to find.
This is the totally galvanizing confession of an amateur investor who at first made money in the stock market and then tried to make money faster.... With a directness that startles, with specific references to specific stock transactions, with an abundance of detail unique in investment literature, the author takes the reader on a devastating roller-coaster ride through the market. From the "hot" tip and the impulsive phone-order to buy or sell, to the verdict in next morning's financial pages; from the chase after people who "know their way around," to the frantic switching of brokers and systems; from the…
Over 100 years ago, a stockbroker wondered why his clients lost money over a full cycle in the stock market. After all, if stocks were back to where they started, shouldn’t they have broken even? He found that at bottoms, investors were cautious short-term traders, whereas at tops, they were confident long-term owners.
This little booklet is available inexpensively on Amazon.
The circulation of a mere rumor that the Morgan interests are accumulating Steel or that the Standard Oil crowd is getting out of St. Paul is sure at any time to create a market following. Most of the tips that are hawked about the Street are based on the supposition that somebody-or-other of consequence is buying or selling certain stocks. I do not know of a single case where anyone has been able to make money consistently by following information of this character, even when the information comes to him first hand. -from "A Speculative Decision" In 1917, an insider…
Some academics dismiss this book because it lacks statistical support. They have a point, but it’s still a great book. It’s also over a hundred years old, so what do you expect?
Gustave Le Bon was a medical doctor who became Professor of Psychology and Allied Sciences at the University of Paris. Le Bon’s key proposal is that crowd thinking is not the sum of individuals’ minds but an interdependent psychological entity. The Crowd is a short book and perennially in print.
One of the most influential works of social psychology in history, The Crowd was highly instrumental in creating this field of study by analyzing, in detail, mass behavior. The book had a profound impact not only on Freud but also on such twentieth-century masters of crowd control as Hitler and Mussolini — both of whom may have used its observations as a guide to stirring up popular passions. In the author's words, "The masses have never thirsted after the truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."…
When I was at Yale, Professor Irving Janis became aware of my interest in mass psychology and asked if I would be interested in seeing a manuscript he was working on. I jumped at the chance and soon was reading Victims of Groupthink.
The book relates histories of bureaucratic decision-making that went wrong. Janis postulated that in a group setting, people defer the hard work of reasoning to others, whom they assume must be working on the problem. As a result, no one works on the problem, and whatever decision emerges derives from the dynamics of group psychology. This book is out of print and hard to find.
Many market analysts have extolled this book, and for good reason. It details activities related to the South Sea Bubble, a stock frenzy that captured the imaginations of Britons in 1711-1720, John Law’s demonically clever Mississippi scheme of 1719–1720 in France, and the Dutch tulip mania of the early 1600s. One of Mackay’s observations:
We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.
Some recent editions are seriously abridged. Be sure to buy the full version.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a history of popular folly by Charles Mackay. The book chronicles its targets in three parts: "National Delusions," "Peculiar Follies," and "Philosophical Delusions." Learn why intelligent people do amazingly stupid things when caught up in speculative edevorse. The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, beards (influence of politics and religion on), witch-hunts, crusades and duels. Present day writers on economics, such as Andrew Tobias, laud the three chapters on economic bubbles.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of citations and interviews with more than 250 key protagonists, experts, and witnesses.
So far, the book is the main -- and only -- antidote to a slew of early partisan “Benghazi” polemics, and the first to put the attack in its longer term historical, political, and social context. If you want to understand some of the events that have shaped present-day America, from political polarization and the election of Donald Trump, to January 6, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian expansionism, and the current Israel-Hamas war, I argue, you need to understand some of the twists and turns of America's most infamous "non-scandal, scandal.”
I was in Benghazi well before, during, and after the attack as a US diplomat and co-director of a medical NGO. I have written three books, and have been a contributor to The NYT, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Salon, The Financial Times, Newsweek, and others.
On September 11, 2012, Al Qaeda proxies attacked and set fire to the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a US Ambassador and three other Americans. The attack launched one of the longest and most consequential 'scandals' in US history, only to disappear from public view once its political value was spent.
Written in a highly engaging narrative style by one of a few Western experts on Libya, and decidely non-partisan, Benghazi!: A New History is the first to provide the full context for an event that divided, incited, and baffled most of America for more than three years, while silently reshaping…
