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

Drawing on the latest scientific research, Jason Zweig shows what happens in your brain when you think about money and tells investors how to take practical, simple steps to avoid common mistakes and become more successful.

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.

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.

Anyone who has ever looked back on a financial decision and said, “How could I have been so stupid?” will benefit from reading this book.

Jason Zweig has been a financial columnist for The Wall Street Journal since 2008. He is the editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, the classic text that Warren Buffett has described as “by far the best book about investing ever written.” He is also the author of Your Money and Your Brain and The Devil’s Financial Dictionary. Before joining WSJ, Zweig was a senior writer for Money magazine, a guest columnist for Time and CNN.com, and the mutual funds editor at Forbes. Zweig has a BA from Columbia University, where he was awarded a John Jay National Scholarship. A frequent commentator on television and radio, Zweig is also a popular public speaker who has addressed the American Association of Individual Investors, the CFA Institute, the Morningstar Investment Conference, and university audiences at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. He was formerly a trustee of the Museum of American Finance, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. He serves on the editorial boards of Financial History magazine and The Journal of Behavioral Finance. He lives in New York City.