Why It Matters
One of the earliest and clearest books ever written on investor psychology.
Selden captures how fear, hope, and imitation govern market movements long before behavioral finance had a name.
He writes not about prices, but about people — how opinion spreads, how overconfidence builds, and how conviction turns to panic. Reading it feels like listening to a century-old mirror of today’s markets.
Core Ideas
- Markets reflect emotion more than information.
- Crowd psychology follows cycles of optimism and despair.
- The best investors learn detachment — acting from reason while others react from feeling.
Investor Lens
Selden’s insight is timeless: the market is not a machine, it’s a mood.
Price swings are simply the external expression of internal states — greed, fear, euphoria, denial.
Understanding this doesn’t make you immune to emotion, but it gives you the language to recognize it.
To study markets is to study human nature, and human nature hasn’t changed since 1912.