Grateful for these early endorsements of The Madness of Markets. They come from a wide range of readers (investors, journalists, behavioural scientists, advertising executives, academics) and highlight the book's broad intended audience.

The Madness of Markets is out today in the US! From Isaac Newton losing a fortune in the South Sea Bubble to AI, meme stocks and the madness of today's markets, it's been a lot of fun bringing this book to life. I'm delighted that US readers can finally get their hands on it. 📕 amazon.com/Madness-Markets-I…

Ten years ago, I offered students a free £50 in class and asked who wanted it. Many students put their hands up, but only a couple were bold enough to come forward and try to take it (even though I made clear it was freely available, and not stealing). This was a social experiment to encourage students to take every opportunity and be proactive, even if it involves discomfort and going against the grain. The £50 went to a student, Laura, who kindly tried to give it back to me after class, but I insisted she'd earned it. I was delighted to see Laura again on Friday when giving a talk to the @LBS Alumni Council. It's no surprise that the same qualities she exhibited 10 years ago are also evident in her willingness to step forward and serve her alumni community on the Council.

Thanks so much to everyone who came to the launch event for The Madness of Markets, to @MerrynSW for being a superb moderator, and @LBS for putting on a fantastic event that will live long in the memory. Out of everything I've ever written, this is the one work I'm most excited about sharing. It's about how our biases lead even smart people to make costly decisions. The direct lessons are in investing, but the broader lessons are for life.

Terrific launch last night at @LBS of @aedmans new book The Madness of Markets & fireside chat w @MerrynSW. Should be required reading for those interested in investment & financial markets.

The Madness of Markets is out today in the UK! It's on the psychology of financial markets – why smart investors make serious mistakes, and how we can overcome our biases to make better decisions. While financial markets are the laboratory, the lessons are much broader and apply to any high-stakes decision. PART I: OVERREACTION 1. Bubble Trouble: Why We All Go Crazy at the Top 2. Mood Music: How Feelings Cloud Finance 3. Much Ado About Nothing: The Name-Game and Other Non-News 4. Monkey See, Monkey Buy: Viral Herding in Markets PART II: UNDERREACTION 5. Slow on the Uptake: When Markets Snooze on News 6. The Hidden Goldmine: Why Intangibles Are the Market’s Blind Spot 7. C-Suite Secrets: Signals From the Summit PART III: MISREACTION 8. When 2 + 2 = 5: Adding Up Market Mistakes 9. Misguided Missiles: Locking Onto the Wrong Targets 10. Legends in Our Own Mind: The Overconfidence Trap PART IV: CORRECTION 11. Outsmarting the Market: Making Sense of Madness I had more fun writing this than anything I've written before. I hope you have just as much fun reading it. 📕 UK: lnkd.in/emgZB-Ay 📕 US: lnkd.in/eAaXB6ji (out on Tuesday)

“A dazzling summation … a stunning indictment of human weaknesses, with numbers attached.” Very grateful for John Authers of Bloomberg @business for his review od The Madness of Markets. Gift link below. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Big thanks to Barnes & Noble for offering 25% off on preorders of The Madness of Markets until Friday. Available to Rewards and Premium members (Rewards membership is free to join). Premium members get an extra 10% off. Pre-order here: barnesandnoble.com/w/the-mad…

The Madness of Markets, by @ajkeen keenon.substack.com/p/the-ma… @aedmans Isaac Newton might be able to foresee the movement of the stars, but he couldn’t foretell the madness of men. It was a lesson that cost the great physicist £4 million (in today’s money) when he threw his fortune into the South Sea Bubble. This priceless parable in Newtonian psychology opens The Madness of Markets, the new book by Alex Edmans — London Business School finance prof, old friend of the show, and author of the bestselling May Contain Lies. Dr Edmans’s prognosis is bracingly unflattering to guys like Isaac Newton and Mark Twain who splurge their fortunes on speculative ventures. Intelligence, he reminds us, is domain-specific, but many smart people simply aren’t intelligent enough to realize this. So, in the age of Robinhood — when we can all trade anything from stocks, options, crypto to NFTs — the supposed wisdom of crowds is sometimes driven over the cliff by the irrational exuberance of dumb individuals. Speaking of driving off the cliff, ninety percent of us think we’re above-average drivers, Edmans jokes, and this same delusion applies to markets. Unfortunately, such stupidity can be expensive for big brain types like Newton or Twain. “When people trade, even before fees and commissions, the average trade loses money,” he warns. So close your Robinhood account and stick your cash in the bank? No, not quite. Know your edge, Edmans reminds us. And when it comes to making sense of the current AI boom, Edmans offers some particularly wise words. The AI sector trades at 25 to 30 times earnings rather than Cisco’s bubble-era 190, he notes, so it’s unlikely anyone will lose their life’s savings on Anthropic or OpenAI. That said, the good doctor Edmans advises, don’t confuse your self-worth with your net worth. That’s a rookie conceit that only somebody as smart as Isaac Newton would fall for.

Delighted to receive the finished copies of The Madness of Markets. @PenguinUKBooks have done a fantastic job with the cover: a half-jacket wrapped around the book like a $100 bill. Out of everything I've ever written, this is the one I'm most excited about sharing. I can't wait for it to be out in a few weeks!

Since Simon Woolley is calling for investigations, perhaps one should be undertaken into how he became Principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, despite almost no academic credentials. When it appointed Professor Geoffrey Ward in 2013, Homerton praised his “deep understanding of research and academic life”, teaching and institutional leadership. Most Oxbridge college heads are distinguished academics, since they need to provide academic leadership and be able to evaluate academic excellence. While I have been unable to find the Homerton brief, other Oxbridge briefs have specified “a distinguished record of achievement in an academic or other intellectually challenging career” and “a deep understanding of the values and demands of a scholarly environment, demonstrating a commitment to education and research”. Now, you don't need to be a career academic to do this. Indeed, Oxbridge colleges may benefit from a diversity of backgrounds. A head of a think tank, major research funder or other knowledge institution may bring equivalent intellectual and institutional credibility. But Woolley has led no such organisation. Homerton's public case for him instead stressed his social-justice campaigning, such as Operation Black Vote. As an ethnic minority myself, I appreciate some of his stances on racial issues. But while he has admirable qualifications for advocacy, academic research demands the opposite mindset: openness to competing viewpoints and evaluating ideas on their scholarly merit, rather than whether they support one's preconceived viewpoint. And this extends beyond Woolley to any head of an Oxbridge college or leading academic institution. These are privileged positions that affect the quality of the faculty who are hired, the students who are admitted and the research that gets funded. They need to be earned through merit.

The erosion of meritocracy in academia extends far beyond Jason Arday. Strategic Management Journal, one of the top-tier journals in management, accepted a paper showing negative market reactions to the appointment of Black executives. After acceptance, it was changed because readers objected. This is extremely unusual. Editors and reviewers can raise concerns, but readers play no role in the review process. Once a paper is accepted, it might later be retracted if serious errors are found which affect its scientific accuracy, but not just because people don't like it. Moreover, once a paper is accepted and posted online, it becomes part of the scientific record. When I was Managing Editor of a journal, sometimes the publisher or the authors made a minor omission (e.g. leaving off the acceptance date or an acknowledgement). The publisher refused to simply add the missing information; they would only issue a corrigendum, leaving the original version intact. Even if a paper is retracted, it still typically remains visible. Here, the original manuscript has completely disappeared. So, the scientific community can only see the version that readers wanted, not the one the authors wrote and the editor/referees accepted. Remarkably, it has been treated even worse than some retracted papers: their original versions remain visible; this one does not. sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…

Good plug here for forthcoming book by @aedmans - one of the smartest people in financial academia of his generation. thetimes.com/business/econom…

The erosion of meritocracy in academia extends far beyond Jason Arday. "Citation Justice" policies ask authors to cite papers not only based on scientific merit, but also the demographics of the authors. For example: "We recognise that references cited in journals such as ours sometimes replicate and reinforce such inequities by under-representing minority scholars... To address these inequities, we exhort our authors whose manuscripts are accepted for publication to critically examine their references with a view to including citations of equally rigorous and relevant scholarship by under-represented minority authors." As a minority scholar, I wish to be cited for the relevance and quality of my work, not be handed citations as a charitable donation. One might argue that "equally rigorous and relevant" means that merit is not sacrificed. But if citations are already based solely on rigour and relevance, there is no need to instruct authors to consider demographics. A policy only matters if it changes behaviour – in this case, away from purely scientific merit. Citation counts in turn influence hiring, promotion, grants and honours. policy.bristoluniversitypres…

"How do you avoid market blunders? By recognising you're a fool." Delighted with this review of The Madness of Markets by @hwallop of @thetimes. The key to better investing is guarding against your biases, not thinking you have brilliant insights. thetimes.com/article/995c07a…

Hilary Cremin, who fawned that Arday was "the best in the world", has 2,000 Google Scholar citations in a 26-year career. While citations differ across fields, in my field a senior professor might have 2,000 in a single year. Many UK education scholars have several times that number. This is why meritocractic hiring matters. As the saying goes, As hire As, Bs hire Cs.

Every appointment in which demographic optics outweigh merit displaces somebody else. Every weak paper contaminates the literature and can influence policy. Every pound of funding allocated on criteria other than research quality is unavailable for potentially groundbreaking work. Yet those in the privileged position of academia rarely recognise their own privilege. Nobody at Cambridge appears to have asked the obvious questions. The Lords, Dames, Sirs and Professors who rushed first to celebrate Arday and then to denounce his critics never have to worry about losing a faculty position or a research grant – they already have theirs. They can pull up the drawbridge while making themselves feel, and look, virtuous by saluting the flag of DEI. Indeed, the most revealing aspect of the [Hilary] Cremin video was not what she said, but that Cambridge chose to film it, publicise it and celebrate it. Universities appoint outstanding academics every year. They do not normally produce promotional videos announcing their moral satisfaction with the appointment. Whatever final judgement is reached on the plagiarism allegations, Arday is not the point. Institutions saw a story that flattered their values and forgot to ask whether it was true. Academia should be society’s most sceptical institution. If it cannot scrutinise its own heroes, it has no moral authority to instruct anyone else. My @Telegraph op-ed on the Jason Arday affair. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08…

"The End of DEI" has been accepted for publication by Financial Management. DEI is one of the most polarizing issues in business and society. Advocates claim that DEI enhances fairness, while critics argue it undermines meritocracy. The problems stem from the practice of DEI – reducing it to demographic diversity – rather than its principle. This paper proposes an alternative framework, Potential, Synergy, and Inclusion, that preserves DEI’s objectives while addressing its weaknesses. 🌱 Potential emphasizes recruiting individuals for their capacity to create future value rather than past achievements. Demographics can be informative about an applicant’s trajectory, but many other aspects of their background are also relevant. 🤝 Synergy focuses on building teams with complementary skills and perspectives. One such synergy arises from cognitive diversity, for which demographics are only a partial source. 🗣️ Inclusion enables employees to voice ideas, challenge norms, and overcome structural frictions. While DEI is viewed as advancing only minority groups and primarily aligned with one side of the political spectrum, the proposed approach seeks to grow the pie for the benefit of all. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

Whose work most influenced you? Professor of Finance at London Business School, @aedmans answers this question on a special episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Hear from today’s leading social and behavioral scientists: ow.ly/kXuE50Zrj9A