In Chapter 24, we go to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to meet the Specialists. These aren’t just regular traders; they are members who have been given a specific job by the exchange: keep the market for your stocks “fair and orderly.”
This is the chapter where Harris explains how scammers work the stock market. Chapter 12 is about bluffers: traders who trick other people into bad trades so they can profit. If you ever wondered how pump and dump schemes actually function at a mechanical level, this is it.
I just spent 30 chapters and about a thousand pages with Atlas Shrugged. Now I’m going to tell you what I actually think about the whole thing. No hedging.
This is a retelling of Chapter 14 (Conclusions) from “Behavioral Finance for Private Banking” by Thorsten Hens, Enrico G. De Giorgi, and Kremena K. Bachmann (Wiley, 2018).
Previous: Internalization and Crossing
You might think there is one stock market. There is not. There are many. And they are all fighting each other for your orders.
Book: Real Estate by the Numbers: A Complete Reference Guide to Deal Analysis Authors: J Scott and Dave Meyer Chapters: 28-30
We made it. Nine chapters. One complete retelling series. And now the question: was this book actually worth the time?
Book: Financial Markets and Institutions, 11th Edition Author: Jeff Madura Publisher: Cengage Learning, 2015 ISBN: 978-1-133-94788-2
Chapter 16 is where things get global. If you have ever traveled abroad and exchanged dollars for euros or pesos, you already know the basics of the foreign exchange market. But there is a whole world of derivative instruments built on top of currency exchange rates. And they move serious money. Foreign exchange derivatives account for about half of all daily forex transaction volume.
So we made it. 9 chapters, 17 posts, one brain that’s a little more aware of its own tricks.
This was “Investing Psychology: The Effects of Behavioral Finance on Investment Choice and Bias” by Tim Richards (ISBN: 978-1-118-72219-0, Wiley 2014). And it was worth every page.
This is it. Chapter 15 of Behavioral Finance and Investor Types by Michael M. Pompian is where everything comes together. All those chapters about biases, personality types, asset classes, and financial planning? They were building up to this. The final chapter answers the obvious question: okay, I know my investor type, now what do I actually do with my portfolio?