I’ve spent my career trying to understand why investors, professional and amateur alike, so consistently act against their own interests. It turns out the answer has less to do with markets and more to do with human psychology. That observation has shaped everything I’ve written on this blog since 2017.

I work as Investment Research Director at St. James’s Place, one of the UK’s largest wealth managers, where I’ve been involved in fund research and portfolio management since 2004. I hold the CFA Charter and completed an MSc in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics in 2016, where I was awarded the Brian Abel-Smith Prize for outstanding performance.

In 2022 I published The Intelligent Fund Investor with Harriman House, a book about the behavioural challenges of investing in funds and why so many investors fail to capture the returns that are available to them.

The posts on this blog are my attempt to think clearly about investor behaviour: why we make the decisions we do, why knowing better rarely helps us behave better, and what, if anything, we can do about it. I try to apply the same scepticism to my own ideas that I apply to everyone else’s.

All views expressed are my own.

You can find me on LinkedIn and on Twitter/X: @behaviouraljoe