Investor Therapy: A Psychologist and Investing Guru Tells You How to Out-Psych Wall Street

1. Leverage your emotions, dont exorcise them. (Understand how your idiosyncratic emotions undermine or enhance your investment decisions)
2. Dont just rely on the facts. (Understand also the deeper psychological forces that move Wall Street)
3. Know yourself. (Master an investing behavior in harmony with your own personality and lifestyle, your reaction to anxiety and pressure)
4. Understand the nuances of risk (Know how you feel when buying and selling)
5. Break the taboo (Understand your mistakes, and correct them)
6. Empathize with management
7. Recognise your investing anxieties
8. Be an interpersonal investor (expansion of perspective and protection against group think)

Very attractive, huh! So sorry that the author failed completely to write up to what he or his editors promised. Dont know whether the author's writing or story telling skill is so poor or what, the book appeared to be a boring pile of 291 dissociated pages that I find it very difficult to concentrate and read on. There are many real life cases and examples, but I can hardly draw from them any practical and memorable lessons.

In a word, dont waste your valuable time and hard earned money on this. Spend them elsewhere more productively.

p.s. How come the author gave no answer/suggestion/analysis for the 9 page "investment personality questionnaire" at the end of the book?? Should readers bring their answers to the author personally for advice???


emotions and money? read this book   March 8, 2004
4 out of 7 found this review helpful

This is a book both every investor and financial advisor should read. Rather than proposing a scheme for eliminating emotions from your investment decision-making, which is the mantra of most books, Geist cogently argues that emotions are always present in risky decisions. His solution is not to ignore them, but instead to understand them and see how they idiosycratically afftect our investment choices.

Investor Threapy is one of the only books I've read that makes clear how profound the ramifications actually are of integrating emotions into investment decision-making. The book clearly spells out in an easily readable way how emotions influence not only when we buy and sell, but what sectors of the market we choose to play in, how we gauge our own risk level, how we repond to herd mentality, how we deal with loss, and how we so often mismatch our personality to an investing style.

Geist offers a fascinating view of how to understand management, and why it is so important to invest along side a group of trusted others-what he calls Interpersonal Investing. Any reader of this book will come away with information and ideas not published anywhere else on how to use our emotions to enhance our perfomance and results.


Dealing with the Inner Game of Investing   March 2, 2004
1 out of 3 found this review helpful

Reviewer: A reader from Winchester, MA

About half way through this book, I made the same mental connection that I made about 20 years ago when I read Tim Gallwey's classic, "The Inner Game of Tennis."
That is, this is a very fresh and relevant way to look at a complex game phenomenon with a very quiet and objective mind.

While this may not be a book for the technically sophisticated investor, it is highly recommended for a wide range of investors that are looking to create and sustain a personal psychological advantage on the market.

In many ways, this is a book that enables the reader to look at the market in a Zenlike way. Rather than dealing with winning investment strategies, it deals with an often overlooked and more important aspect of investing: creating and managing winning emotional strategies.

Without sounding overly Eastern in philosophy, Dr. Geist deals with strategies to help the average investor focus more of their energies on understanding their personal emotional reactions to the market. His thesis is that you can achieve greater happiness and success by integrating an emotional understanding of yourself into your investing strategies.

Like Gallwey, Dr. Geist provides the reader with a much needed perspective and tools for helping to manage the most difficult opponent we all face, our own emotional inner game.