Finance for Normal People teaches behavioral finance to people like you and me - normal people, neither rational nor irrational. We are consumers, savers, investors, and managers - corporate managers, money managers, financial advisers, and all other financial professionals. The book guides us to know our wants-including hope for riches, protection from poverty, caring for family, sincere social responsibility and high social status. It teaches financial facts and human behavior, including making cognitive and emotional shortcuts and avoiding cognitive and emotional errors such as overconfidence, hindsight, exaggerated fear, and unrealistic hope. And it guides us to banish ignorance, gain knowledge, and increase the ratio of smart to foolish behavior on our way to what we want. These lessons of behavioral finance draw on what we know about us-normal people-including our wants, cognition, and emotions. And they draw on the roles of these factors in saving and spending, portfolio construction, returns we can expect from our investments, and whether we can hope to beat the market. Meir Statman, a founder of behavioral finance, draws on his extensive research and the research of many others to build a unified structure of behavioral finance. Its foundation blocks include normal behavior, behavioral portfolio theory, behavioral life-cycle theory, behavioral asset pricing theory, and behavioral market efficiency.

Using a unique data set consisting of more than 36.5 million submitted retail investor orders over the course of five years, Matthias Burghardt constructs an innovative retail investor sentiment index. He shows that retail investors’ trading decisions are correlated, that retail investors are contrarians, and that a profitable trading strategy can be based on these aggregated sentiment measures.

In an ever-changing economy, market specialists strive to find new ways to evaluate the risks and potential reward of economic ventures by assessing the importance of human reaction during the economic planning process. The Handbook of Research on Behavioral Finance and Investment Strategies: Decision Making in the Financial Industry presents an interdisciplinary, comparative, and competitive analysis of the thought processes and planning necessary for individual and corporate economic management. This publication is an essential reference source for professionals, practitioners, and managers working in the field of finance, as well as researchers and academicians interested in an interdisciplinary approach to combine financial management, sociology, and psychology.

For the ecomometric analysis of time series data, Microfit should be a valuable package. With its choice of data analysis options, this program is an aid to all those interested in the evaluation and design of advanced univariate and multivariate time series models. Microfit is an interactive, menu-driven program with facilities for estimating and testing equations, forecasting, data processing, file management, and graphic display. Version 4.0 builds on the success of its predecessors, but should now be easier to use in both its new Windows format and its original DOS environment. It is a resource for business, banking, teaching, and research. with 80486 or 80486SX processor. At least 8Mb of free RAM (Windows) or 4Mb free RAM (DOS). Maths co-processor is required with an 80486SX. DOS 3.0 or higher. At least 8Mb free hard-disk space (Windows) or 12Mb (DOS).

Behavioral finance is the study of how psychology affects financial decision making and financial markets. It is increasingly becoming the common way of understanding investor behavior and stock market activity. Incorporating the latest research and theory, Shefrin offers both a strong theory and efficient empirical tools that address derivatives, fixed income securities, mean-variance efficient portfolios, and the market portfolio. The book provides a series of examples to illustrate the theory. The second edition continues the tradition of the first edition by being the one and only book to focus completely on how behavioral finance principles affect asset pricing, now with its theory deepened and enriched by a plethora of research since the first edition

Since the advent of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods in the early 1990s, Bayesian methods have been proposed for a large and growing number of applications. One of the main advantages of Bayesian inference is the ability to deal with many different sources of uncertainty, including data, models, parameters and parameter restriction uncertainties, in a unified and coherent framework. This book contributes to this literature by collecting a set of carefully evaluated contributions that are grouped amongst two topics in financial economics. The first three papers refer to macro-finance issues for real economy, including the elasticity of factor substitution (ES) in the Cobb–Douglas production function, the effects of government public spending components, and quantitative easing, monetary policy and economics. The last three contributions focus on cryptocurrency and stock market predictability. All arguments are central ingredients in the current economic discussion and their importance has only been further emphasized by the COVID-19 crisis.

Wolfgang Drobetz provides empirical evidence on the time variation of expected stock returns over the stages of the business cycle.