Biography
Mark K. Bhasin, CFA, is senior vice president of Basis Investment Group, LLC, New York City, and adjunct associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business
Incorporating concepts from evolution and ecology, this lucid and thought-provoking book presents the economy as an evolutionary system on the premise that an understanding of how evolution works in the biological realm provides insight into this process. It will help allocators improve their allocation decisions and will help all investors attain a more robust understanding of the dynamics that create and sustain value.
In this examination of the life and investment strategies of John Maynard Keynes, the author argues that the great economist and risk-taking investor believed that it is best to put your investing on autopilot with a sound plan that meets your goals — revisiting it once a year — and then go out and live your life.
Katherine Collins, CFA, urges us to transform the investment process from the roots up by drawing on biomimicry — a new discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems — to help us construct our investment portfolios.
The global financial crisis revealed a critical need for a substantial reassessment of the fundamental workings of financial systems, their interactions with the real economy, and the circumstances that tip such systems from stability to instability. In this book, Prasanna Gai provides a fresh look at these increasingly important fields.
In the era of Big Data, the increased volume of data analysis inevitably entails an upsurge in bad analysis. The author argues that consumers should be extra vigilant when interpreting and relying on data analysis and encourages readers to improve their critical assessment of data analysis to optimize decision making.
Rethinking Expectations provides fresh approaches to macroeconomic analysis, including imperfect knowledge economics (IKE), which models individual behavior and aggregate outcomes and explores the frontier of what formal macroeconomic and finance theory can deliver. These new approaches are needed, given the recent Great Recession and spectacular boom and bust in asset prices.
James Owen Weatherall argues that given the proven track record of applying ideas developed in physics to finance, it is time to do it again. His book is about the future of finance and the new set of tools that will facilitate the proper functioning of the world’s economies.
John Coates, senior research fellow in neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge, offers a number of fascinating lessons from a booming new field, the biology of risk, revealing how risk taking and stress transform our body chemistry and drive us to irrational exuberance or pessimism. When such chemical surges overwhelm traders and investors, they tend to suffer either euphoric overconfidence or extreme timidity.
Thomas Mayer argues persuasively that Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) could work if the member states would embrace a new EMU architecture. Even though all past monetary unions of sovereign states have failed, Mayer remains hopeful that the EMU can develop a more robust framework and contribute to the historical work of European unification.