The Anxious Investor: Mastering the Mental Game of Investing

A revelatory new guide to becoming a smarter investor, drawing upon behavioral psychology, economic modeling, and market history to offer practical advice for reaching your financial goals

"With the equity and fixed-income markets off to a rough start in 2022, investors might do well to review the lessons shared in Mr. Nations’s book." —Wall Street Journal

The human brain is ill-suited to making wise investment decisions. We are overconfident in our own knowledge and hunches, terrible at assessing risk, and prone to chasing financial thrills rather than measured long-term goals. Making matters worse, periods of severe market turbulence—whether the dotcom bubble of the late 90’s, the Great Recession a decade later, or the brief, vertiginous COVID crash of 2020—bring out our most irrational selves, at the exact moment when the consequences for investment mistakes are most severe.

Scott Nations has spent his career studying market volatility. His firm, Nations Indexes, is the world’s leading independent developer of volatility and option-enhanced indexes. In The Anxious Investor, he teaches readers how to understand markets, master their own fear, and make the most of their money. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in behavioral psychology, Nations shows that the secrets to excellent investing lie in mastering the quirks of human psychology. How are some investors able to make prudent decisions under pressure, while others rely on gut instinct to disastrous effect? How can we prepare for a market crash before it happens? And what can help us stay the course when the waters get choppy? Using the stories of three infamous market bubbles as his backdrop, Nations offers readers history’s hard-earned lessons about greed, volatility, and value.

Whether you’re saving for retirement, a home, or a child’s college education, The Anxious Investor offers a blueprint for achieving your goals. While we can never know exactly which financial surprises may loom ahead, here is an indispensable resource for investors to make sense of them.

Scott Nations is the president of NationsShares, a financial engineering firm. He is a regular contributor to CNBC, where he frequently appears on-air to discuss markets, derivatives, and other investment topics. He is the author of two technical books for option traders, Options Math for Traders and The Complete Book of Option Spreads and Combinations. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.