Financial Speculation: Trading Financial Biases and Behaviour

Successful trading is ultimately, a mind game, the outcome as much a result of how you act in pressure situations as of your trading skills. The hot new field of behavioral finance focuses on how successful traders and investors act and react, during uncertainty and under pressure. This understanding offers an additional weapon in your trading armory for making money in the markets. Financial Speculation is a terrific, widely-hailed work on how you can become a more successful trader by understanding how your fellow traders are likely to behave in various situations. In this important book, Gerald Ashley gets to the heart of what moves financial markets. Simple labels, such as gambling and speculation, don't help us grasp the underlying forces that drive the markets. It's far more important to understand the behaviour and biases of the market players their actions and motivations are the vital components that drive everything; bubbles, crashes, huge fortunes, reckless borrowing and complex instruments and strategies, all flow from this simple fact. How market players act within their inner selves, apply their own set of risk and reward values to the seeming chaos of the market, is absolutely crucial. The book ranges across all the major asset classes, looks at past masters of the art, examines modern thinking on finance and risk, assesses the value of experts, economists, chartists, market gurus and analysts. The author draws on a wealth of revealing and instructive market insights, stories and anecdotes, uses simple examples to explain how the basic tools of finance fit together, how to profit in this often complex and unforgiving landscape.