Mind Over Money: How to Match Your Emotional Style to a Winning Financial Strategy

Good explanation of psychological forces behind investing decisions. Helped me not the least due to explaining that many of my feelings during the bear market are quite normal and most people go through them. The book also recommends, like most other great investors do, to always try and have a fair value valuation before buying a stock so your fear can be divorced from the market gyrations. As the book aptly says, the market is a manic-depressive and should probably be put on the couch itself. The book may also sound simplistic to some readers but I think there's a lot of powerful stuff here, simplest ideas can sometimes be the most powerful. I also identified with the author in that have a passion for investing while having another profession full-time.

Mind Over Money provides helpful information to any investor, no matter how experienced. It explains how to control emotions such as greed and fear in order to be most successful with your investing. Schott offers beneficial advice on how to develop a strategy and how to set expectations for your stocks so that you will guarantee a long-term profit in the market. He explains different investment possibilities such as value and growth stocks or bonds and what types are more or less risky than others. He also tells how to evaluate and research them and how they should be put into your own portfolio. His insight into the reasons people lose a lot of money help you to understand what it takes to avoid loss and encourage profit. As both an experienced investor and knowledgable psychologist, Schott analyses and guides each kind of emotion a person experiences through investing money. He gives you the confidence to control your emotions and your money and to be sure of your decisions. In letting you know how to tell when to buy and when to sell, he gives the assurance needed to make sound choices. Overall, this book will put you ahead of the game in your chances of excelling in the stock market.

I bought this book after reading the following review in Publishers Weekly, and agree with it completely: "Schott here brings together two concurrent careers -- as a financial manager and a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist -- lending a novel and significant dimension to personal investment counseling. Writing with freelancer Arbeiter, he outlines programs of diversification, share value appraisal, by-and-sell timing and the like to suit the psychological needs of various types of investors: timid, indecisive, impulsive, guilt-ridden, safety-minded, overconfident or simply the innate gambler. "Handling greed in a bull market and fear in a bear market" is an investor's prime need, according to the authors, who suggest specific standards for selling, while maintaining that the "best way to make money is to buy good companies and stick with them." Offering the reader-investor emotional self-discovery, this is also a particularly accessible and penetrating analysis of all investment vehicles, enlivened by case histories, anecdotes and quotes from the likes of Warren Buffet, along with portfolio listings of stocks and bonds chosen especially for each emotional type."

I was fascinated by the fact that the author of this book has a first career as a psychiatrist and thought that it would be an interesting read, to see why people make investment mistakes. I was certainly satisfied in that respect. The book is replete with stories of Dr. Schott's client's and patient's investment mistakes (often quite funny) and successes. Little did I know, this book would also provide great advice for an interested but novice investor. Dr. Schott divulges his own portfolio and explains exactly what percentage of your own money should be invested in what stocks, or mutual funds depending on your goals. And no wonder! The next day, I saw Dr. Schott on C-Span. He had predicted the day's market drop. And I also opened Money magazine in which he was featured! All in all, the best book I've read this fall! I'm sure it will pay for itself many times over!!

I am new to investing in equities (less than a year). I found this book helpful in staying focused on why I should keep my money in the market during these volatile times. The book gave me reasons why the market reacts to outside events which have no bearing to a particular stock's value. John Schott uses time tested investment methods and lets the reader choose which type of investor they want to be. He does not judge the investor types only explains the thought processes that lead to the decisions made by individual investors. Although I disliked the powerlessness the book made me feel I had over my stocks, I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that I had the understanding of why it is so. I would recommend this book to investors who are trying to better understand why they buy the stocks they do.