The Mind of Wall Street
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
The Mind of Wall Street
| Full title | The Mind of Wall Street: A Legendary Financier on the Perils of Greed and the Mysteries of the Market |
|---|---|
| Author | Leon Levy and Eugene Linden |
| Published | 2002 |
| Pages | 240 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Leon Levy — Oppenheimer co-founder and a pioneer of both mutual funds and the modern hedge fund — on why prices detach from value: markets are priced by moods that participants mistake for analysis, and the same manias recur because the people in them are always new. |
The Mind of Wall Street
Where I heard about it
- Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the Himalaya Capital bibliography, in the section on Value Investing, Finance, and Capitalism, which keeps returning to why prices detach from value in the first place.
About this edition
Written with journalist Eugene Linden at the end of a fifty-year career that ran from the late 1940s through the dot-com collapse. Part memoir — bankrupt railroads, distressed real estate, the 1970s Nifty Fifty — and part warning, published just as the bubble he had been describing finished deflating. His own best trades, he says, came from noticing when a consensus had become emotional rather than reasoned.
Connections
- Market Psychology — the explicit subject; Levy treats mood as the primary pricing mechanism.
- Behavioral Finance — the same claim in academic dress, arrived at here from the trading desk instead.
- Value Investing — the discipline that only pays if the psychology Levy describes is real.
- Financial History — fifty years of cycles told by someone who traded each of them.
- Li Lu · Himalaya Capital — the curator and the bibliography.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.